Electrophoretic deposition of CuO particulate thick film for ethanol sensing Anisha Bandyopadhyay 1 , Kamalika Mandal 1 , Vibhav Ambardekar 2 , Debasish Das 3 , and S. B. Majumder 1, * 1 Materials Science Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India 2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India 3 School of Nano Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India Received: 3 May 2021 Accepted: 21 May 2021 Published online: 12 June 2021 Ó The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021 ABSTRACT Detection of volatile organic compounds is of utmost importance in numerous applications such as medical diagnosis, air quality monitoring, hazardous gas detection and food industry. In the present work, investigation on the ethanol- sensing performance of CuO thick film fabricated by electrophoretic deposition (EPD) technique was done. Oval-shaped CuO powder is prepared at room temperature via a facile wet chemical method. A simple, versatile and repro- ducible electrophoretic deposition technique is employed to fabricate thick film of the as-synthesized CuO powder on to a non-conducting alumina pellet. The sensing performance of EPD-grown thick film CuO sensor has been investigated in static ambient. The uniform and porous sensing layer fabricated by EPD technique exhibits good sensing characteristics such as high response % (* 129%), quick response (38 s), recovery (462 s) time and stable baseline resistance. For better understanding of sensing performance, theoretical analysis such as stability of the sensing element analysis and response versus tempera- ture simulation were performed. Characteristics constant response time (* 88 s) is obtained for different test gas concentrations in the range of 50 ppm to 300 ppm. From response versus temperature simulation, activation energies of transduction and first-order kinetics were estimated as 29.43 kJ/mol and 62.99 kJ/mol, respectively. 1 Introduction Attention to environmental pollution and methods of measuring biological pollutants is one of the most important and attractive issues in the field of health. Over the past few decades, immense attention has been devoted to develop suitable materials and methods to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for monitoring air quality, chemical, indus- trial, process control and medical diagnosis. [1]. Among the different VOCs, ethanol is one of the commonly used solvent in food industry, brewing Address correspondence to E-mail: subhasish@matsc.iitkgp.ac.in https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-021-06247-0 J Mater Sci: Mater Electron (2021) 32:17324–17335