Issue 5, 2019

Highly sensitive and room temperature detection of ultra-low concentrations of O3 using self-powered sensing elements of Cu2O nanocubes

Abstract

The fundamental development of the design of novel self-powered ozone sensing elements, operating at room temperature, based on p-type metal oxides paves the way to a new class of low cost, highly promising gas sensing devices. In this work, p-type Cu2O nanocubes were synthesized by a simple solution-based method and tested as a self-powered ozone sensing element, at room temperature (25 °C) for the first time. Highly crystalline Cu2O nanocubes with 30 nm size were characterized by X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). Self-powered sensing elements of Cu2O nanocubes have been successfully fabricated by deposition of Cu2O nanocubes on interdigitated electrodes (IDEs) consisting of two connection tracks with 500 digits and a gap of 5 μm in order to investigate their response to ozone at room temperature. The experimental results showed that the use of nanocubes as sensing elements was suitable for detecting ultra-low concentrations of O3 down to 10 ppb at room temperature with very high sensitivity (28%) and a very low response/recovery time. The reversible sensing process of the relatively weak binding of O3 species by trapping sites on Cu2O facets with increased oxygen content was studied by using density functional theory (DFT) calculations.

Graphical abstract: Highly sensitive and room temperature detection of ultra-low concentrations of O3 using self-powered sensing elements of Cu2O nanocubes

  • This article is part of the themed collection: Gas sensing

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
23 Janv. 2019
Accepted
03 Apr. 2019
First published
03 Apr. 2019
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Nanoscale Adv., 2019,1, 2009-2017

Highly sensitive and room temperature detection of ultra-low concentrations of O3 using self-powered sensing elements of Cu2O nanocubes

E. Petromichelaki, E. Gagaoudakis, K. Moschovis, L. Tsetseris, T. D. Anthopoulos, G. Kiriakidis and V. Binas, Nanoscale Adv., 2019, 1, 2009 DOI: 10.1039/C9NA00043G

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements