Selective detection of carbon dioxide using LaOCl-functionalized SnO₂ nanowires for air-quality monitoring

In spite of the technical important of monitoring CO(2) gas by using a semiconductor-type gas sensor, a good sensitive and selective semiconductor CO(2) sensor has been not realized due to the rather unreactive toward CO(2) of conventional semiconductor metal oxides. In this work, a novel semiconductor CO(2) sensor was developed by functionalizing SnO(2) nanowires (NWs) with LaOCl, which was obtained by heat-treating the SnO(2) NWs coating with LaCl(3) aqueous solution at a temperature range of 500-700°C. The bare SnO(2) NWs and LaOCl-SnO(2) NWs sensors were characterized with CO(2) (250-4,000 ppm) and interference gases (100 ppm CO, 100 ppm H(2), 250 ppm LPG, 10 ppm NO(2) and 20 ppm NH(3)) at different operating temperatures for comparison. The SnO(2) NWs sensors functionalized with different concentrations of LaCl(3) solution were also examined to find optimized values. Comparative gas sensing results reveal that LaOCl-SnO(2) NWs sensors exhibit much higher response, shorter response-recovery and better selectivity in detecting CO(2) gas at 400°C operating temperature than the bare SnO(2) NWs sensors. This finding indicates that the functionalizing with LaOCl greatly improves the CO(2) response of SnO(2) NWs-based sensor, which is attributed to (i) p-n junction formation of LaOCl (p-type) and SnO(2) nanowires (n-type) that led to the extension of electron depletion and (ii) the favorable catalytic effect of LaOCl to CO(2) gas.