Resonant cantilever based on piezoelectric materials is one of the most promising platforms for real-time humidity sensing. In this letter, we propose a humidity sensor based on an AlN piezoelectric microcantilever with a high-order resonant mode and a sensing layer of MoS2. The top electrode of cantilever is designed into two groups of segmented electrodes in order to achieve a high intensity of the resonance peak of the cantilever resonator operated at a high-order mode. Compared with the humidity sensor based on a standard cantilever with the same dimension, the sensitivity of the newly proposed humidity sensor is increased from 5.99 to 778 Hz/%RH when the humidity is about 80%RH. The resolution is increased from 0.21%RH to 0.025%RH because of the improvement of the ratio of sensitivity to noise, which cannot be achieved simply by increasing the frequency. The sensor shows a low hysteresis (5.8%) in a wide humidity sensing range from 10%RH to 90%RH. Moreover, the proposed humidity sensor has good short-term repeatability, fast response (0.6 s) and recovery (8 s) to humidity changes, indicating its great potential for fast-response detection.
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