Nanosensors for gas sensing applications

Abstract

Semiconductor-based gas sensors are the important family of electronic devices that are widely used in various sciences and industries. The basic principles of this type of sensor are based on the reaction of the gas molecules and the semiconductor surface. Therefore, nanostructured semiconductors are the best candidate for fabricating of this type of gas sensor due to their high surface area/volume ratio. Of these types of semiconductors, metal-oxides semiconductors (MOS) such as zinc oxide (ZnO) and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) (or moly) are very important. Therefore, in this chapter the recent findings of these types of sensors will be presented and discussed. The capability of MoS2 nanostructures as a member of TMDs to detect different gases such as H2 and NO2 has been presented. We presented that, how hybrid MoS2 shown better gas sensing performance in comparison the pristine MoS2. In the next step, ZnO nanostructures from MOS family have been chosen to study their gas sensing applications to detect ammonia, acetic acid, ethanol, and methanol. In addition, the effects of graphene as a 2-dimensional (2D) structure on gas sensing performance of ZnO nanostructures have been discussed. Furthermore, it has been shown how the gas sensing performance of ZnO nanostructures could be improved by an organic semiconductor such as polyaniline (PAni).