Metal Oxide Nanostructures and Their Gas Sensing Properties: A Review

By Yufeng Sun, Shao-Bo Liu, Fanli Meng, Jinyun Liu, Zhen Jin, Lingtao Kong, Jinhuai Liu. Italian National Conference on Sensors, 2012

1,091 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Metal oxide gas sensors are predominant solid-state gas detecting devices for domestic, commercial and industrial applications, which have many advantages such as low cost, easy production, and compact size. However, the performance of such sensors is significantly influenced by the morphology and structure of sensing materials, resulting in a great obstacle for gas sensors based on bulk materials or dense films to achieve highly-sensitive properties. Lots of metal oxide nanostructures have been developed to improve the gas sensing properties such as sensitivity, selectivity, response speed, and so on. Here, we provide a brief overview of metal oxide nanostructures and their gas sensing properties from the aspects of particle size, morphology and doping. When the particle size of metal oxide is close to or less than double thickness of the space-charge layer, the sensitivity of the sensor will increase remarkably, which would be called “small size effect”, yet small size of metal oxide nanoparticles will be compactly sintered together during the film coating process which is disadvantage for gas diffusion in them. In view of those reasons, nanostructures with many kinds of shapes such as porous nanotubes, porous nanospheres and so on have been investigated, that not only possessed large surface area and relatively mass reactive sites, but also formed relatively loose film structures which is an advantage for gas diffusion. Besides, doping is also an effective method to decrease particle size and improve gas sensing properties. Therefore, the gas sensing properties of metal oxide nanostructures assembled by nanoparticles are reviewed in this article. The effect of doping is also summarized and finally the perspectives of metal oxide gas sensor are given.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd976adcaf1d40d70f3637a5896e361ff572687b

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Citations in the corpus

First Fifty Years of Chemoresistive Gas Sensors (2015, background): “The better performance of these hybrid sensors are also attributed to the effective electron transfer between the metal oxide particles and the highly conductive carbon nanotube network [42–44].”
Influence of Al doping on the structural, morphological, optical, and gas sensing properties of ZnO nanorods (2017, background): “During gasesolid interactions, several events occur on the grains such as the adsorption of oxygen species on the grains surface, redox reactions between the grains and gases, electron transfer among the grains, and desorption of the target gas from the grains [49,50].”
Two-Dimensional Materials for Sensing: Graphene and Beyond (2015, background): “In the case of 2D NSs, the synthesis of single-crystalline structure with numerous pores was found to be easier as compared to 1D NWs [172].”
Gas sensing and capturing based on two‐dimensional layered materials: Overview from theoretical perspective (2018, background): “Nanomaterials were thus considered as promising candidates to improve gas sensing properties in sensitivity, selectivity, and response speed due to large surface–volume ratio and massive reactive sites (Sun et al., 2012).”
2D Materials for Gas Sensing Applications: A Review on Graphene Oxide, MoS2, WS2 and Phosphorene (2018, methodology): “) [6,7], have been widely used to detect target gases.”