From 0D to 2D: N-doped carbon nanosheets for detection of alcohol-based chemical vapours

Abstract

The application of N-doped carbon nanosheets, with and without embedded carbon dots, as active materials for the room temperature chemoresistive detection of methanol and/or ethanol is presented. The new carbons were made by converting 0D N-doped carbon dots (NCDs) to 2D nitrogen-doped carbon nanosheets by heat treatment (200–700 °C). The nanosheets exhibited a lateral size of ∼3 μm and a thickness of ∼12 nm at the highest annealing temperature. Both Raman and TEM analyses showed morphological transitions of the dots to the sheets, whilst XPS analysis revealed transformation of the N-bonding states with increasing temperature. PDF analysis confirmed the presence of defective carbon sheets. Room temperature screening of the chemical vapours of two alcohols (methanol and ethanol), revealed that the structure and the type of N-configuration influenced the detection of the chemical vapours. For instance, the lateral size of the nanosheets and the high charge density N-configurations promoted detection of both methanol and ethanol vapours at good sensitivity (−16.8 × 10⁻⁵ ppm⁻¹_EtOH and 1.2 × 10⁻⁵ ppm⁻¹_MeOH) and low LoD (∼44 ppm_EtOH and ∼30.3 ppm_MeOH) values. The study showed that the composite nature as well as the large basal area of the carbon nanosheets enabled generation of adequate defective sites that facilitated easy adsorption of the VOC analyte molecules, thereby eliminating the need to use conducting polymers or the formation of porous molecular frameworks for the alcohol detection.