Abstract
Ammonia (NH3) is a vital compound in diversified fields, including agriculture, automotive, chemical, food processing, hydrogen production and storage, and biomedical applications. Its extensive industrial use and emission have emerged hazardous to the ecosystem and have raised global public health concerns for monitoring NH3 emissions and implementing proper safety strategies. These facts created emergent demand for translational and sustainable approaches to design efficient, affordable, and high-performance compact NH3 sensors. Commercially available NH3 sensors possess three major bottlenecks: poor selectivity, low concentration detection, and room-temperature operation. State-of-the-art NH3 sensors are scaling up using advanced nano-systems possessing rapid, selective, efficient, and enhanced detection to overcome these challenges. MXene–polymer nanocomposites (MXP-NCs) are emerging as advanced nanomaterials of choice for NH3 sensing owing to their affordability, excellent conductivity, mechanical flexibility, scalable production, rich surface functionalities, and tunable morphology. The MXP-NCs have demonstrated high performance to develop next-generation intelligent NH3 sensors in agricultural, industrial, and biomedical applications. However, their excellent NH3-sensing features are not articulated in the form of a review. This comprehensive review summarizes state-of-the-art MXP-NCs fabrication techniques, optimization of desired properties, enhanced sensing characteristics, and applications to detect airborne NH3. Furthermore, an overview of challenges, possible solutions, and prospects associated with MXP-NCs is discussed.
Highlights
Ammonia (NH3 ) is extensively used in various commercial products and manufacturing industries, including refrigerants, fertilizers, explosives, hydrogen storage and production, pharmaceuticals, packaging, and chemicals [1,2]
Many reports based on density functional theory (DFT) have predicted the specific affinity of MXene–polymer nanocomposites (MXP-NCs) toward NH3, which has led to dedicated research toward MXP-NCs-based NH3 sensors [38,39,40]
Depending upon the nature of the polymer, interfacial multi-interactions (Figure 4) including covalent interaction (poly(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate: (PDMAEMA) [47], electrostatic interaction (PAN, PEDOT) [48,49] and hydrogen bonds (PPY, PAM, PSS) [50,51] results in the formation of MXP-NCs with MXene layers stacked by polymer chains
Summary
Ammonia (NH3 ) is extensively used in various commercial products and manufacturing industries, including refrigerants, fertilizers, explosives, hydrogen storage and production, pharmaceuticals, packaging, and chemicals [1,2]. Chemiresistors have become critical NH3 sensing technologies due to their miniaturized design, low-cost, user-friendly, portable, and energy efficiency to detect NH3 (at ~1ppb) in human breath, workplace leak, and agricultural fields [10,13]. Chemiresistor is a sensor that consists of a sensing material in the form of a layer deposited over a substrate containing electrodes followed by detecting circuitry [10]. Various theoretical studies based on density functional theory predict MXP-NCs to possess better affinity toward ammonia [38,39,40] This proposes MXP-NCs as a promising sensing material for ammonia monitoring as compared to other 2D materials –polymer nanocomposites. There is significant literature dedicated to MXene for gas detection applications; the reports on MXene–polymer nanocomposite-based chemiresistors are scarce [25,27]. Better optimization is required for the commercialization of nanocomposite-based NH3 sensors
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