Ultrasensitive room-temperature acetone gas sensors employing green-solvent-processed aligned InNdO nanofiber field-effect transistors

Abstract

The development of a high-performance acetone gas sensor for detecting low concentrations of acetone gas is still a key issue. Here, we propose a green-solution-processed electrospinning technique to construct Nd-doped aligned In₂O₃ nanofiber field-effect transistors. Benefitting from electron transport, the aligned InNdO nanofiber field-effect transistor (FET) exhibits a high mobility of 5.5 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹ and an on/off current ratio of 10⁷. As a result, when used in acetone gas sensors, the gas sensor showed excellent properties for acetone detection at room temperature (20 °C), including high response (88) under 4 ppm, a fast response and recovery time (31/53 s), a relatively low detection limit (69 ppb) and acceptable selectivity of acetone gas. In addition, capacitance–voltage (C–V) analysis was used to further explore the internal mechanism of acetone sensing. This work offers an efficient and novel strategy to design high-performance acetone gas sensors for ppb-level detection at room temperature (20 °C).