Abstract
Gas sensors with excellent stability and a high response at room temperature has drawn a great deal of attention and demand for them is huge. Surface designs provide inspiration toward making more useful sensor devices. The facile electrospinning process and Ar plasma treatment are used to fabricate rich and stable oxygen vacancies that contain a core-shell structured SnO2 polyaniline (PANI) nanotube. It shows that the induced surface oxygen vacancies would accelerate the PANI shell to generate more protons, which can enhance its sensor responsibility through reacting with the target Ammonia (NH3) gas. It was also found that the obtained oxygen vacancies can be well-protected by the coated PANI shell, which enhance and stabilize the gas response. It shows that the room temperature for the gas response of NH3 can reach up to 35.3 at 100 ppm. Finally, its good stability is demonstrated by the response-recovery performances carried out over 3 months and multiple cycles. This work indicates that this well-designed PANI-coated plasma-treated SnO2 is a potential way to design ammonia gas sensors.
Highlights
Ammonia (NH3), a colorless, strong, volatile gas, which can have a huge impact on the respiratory tract and eyes at a concentration below 50 ppm, has drawn much attention (Timmer et al, 2005; Li et al, 2016)
No peak shift or new peaks could be found in the sample treated by Ar plasma, which implied that the Ar plasma treatment would not destroy the phase structure. The reason for this should be that the treatment only occurred on the surface and on a few destroyed atom layers, which would result in many surface defects like oxygen vacancies
Compared with the original SnO2, the absorbed oxygen in O 1s curve for Treatment of SnO2 Nanotube and Electrode (T-SnO2) and PANI-T-SnO2 exhibited a significant drift from 531.25 to 532 eV, which indicated the existence of oxygen vacancies (Chen et al, 2020a). This peak in T-SnO2 was relatively lower than that in PANI-T-SnO2, which meant that some surface oxygen vacancies obtained by Ar plasma treatment in T-SnO2 would re-oxidate without any protective effect from the PANI shell
Summary
Ammonia (NH3), a colorless, strong, volatile gas, which can have a huge impact on the respiratory tract and eyes at a concentration below 50 ppm, has drawn much attention (Timmer et al, 2005; Li et al, 2016). In this work, we fabricated a nanotube core-shell structured SnO2-PANI nanotube with rich and stable oxygen vacancies to operate an NH3 sensor under room temperature.
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