Influence of low-dimension carbon-based electrodes on the performance of SnO ₂ nanofiber gas sensors at room temperature

Abstract

Abstract Room-temperature NO 2 gas sensors are fabricated by employing tin oxide (SnO 2 ) nanofibers (NFs) as sensing layers and low-dimension carbon nanomaterials, including single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) and reduced graphene oxide (rGO), as conductive interdigital electrodes (IDEs). The morphology characteristics and gas sensing performance of rGO IDEs-SnO 2 and SWCNTs IDEs-SnO 2 gas sensors have been investigated. The results demonstrate that the response of rGO IDEs based sensors achieves 90.0% after been exposed to 12 ppm NO 2 , which is superior to the responses of Ti/Au and SWCNTs IDEs based sensors (55.1% and 16.7%, respectively). The rGO IDEs-SnO 2 sensor exhibits excellent sensitivity, large recovery capability and repeatability, and high selectivity at room temperature. The sensing mechanism of such prominent performance has also been analyzed, revealing that the outstanding properties could be attributed to a large number of active adsorption sites, the formation of a p–n heterojunction and a large effective contact area between the two-dimensional rGO nanosheets and the tube-shaped SnO 2 NFs. This work helps to build up a potential platform to explore effective electrodes for future novel NO 2 gas sensors in practical gas sensing applications.