Photoacoustic Sensing of Trapped Fluids in Nanoporous Thin Films: Device Engineering and Sensing Scheme

Accessing fluid infiltration in nanogranular coatings is an outstanding challenge, of relevance for applications ranging from nanomedicine to catalysis. A sensing platform, allowing quantifying the amount of fluid infiltrated in a nanogranular ultrathin coating, with thickness in the 10–40 nm range, is here proposed and theoretically investigated by multiscale modeling. The scheme relies on impulsive photoacoustic excitation of hypersonic...