Controlling ambient humid condition through high performance humidity sensors has become important for various fields, including industrial process, food storage, and the preservation of historic remains. Although aerosol deposited humidity sensors using ceramic BaTiO3 (BT) material have been widely studied because of their longtime stability, there remain critical disadvantages, such as low sensitivity, low linearity, and slow response/recovery time in case of the sensors fabricated at room temperature. To achieve superior humidity sensing properties even at room temperature condition, BT-Cu composite films utilizing aerosol deposition (AD) process have been proposed based on the percolation theory. The BT-Cu composite films showed gradually improved sensing properties until the Cu concentration reached 15 wt% in the composite film. However, the excessive Cu (above 30 wt%) containing BT-Cu composite films showed a rapid decrease of the sensing properties. The results of observed surface morphology of the AD fabricated composite films, to figure out the metal filler effect, showed correlation between surface topography as well as size and the amount of open pores according to the metal filler content. Overall, it is very important not only dielectric constant of the humidity sensing films but also microstructures, because they affect either the variation range of capacitance by ambient humidity or adsorption/desorption of ambient humidity onto/from the humidity sensing films.
