Growth and properties of well-crystalline cerium oxide (CeO2) nanoflakes for environmental and sensor applications

This paper reports the synthesis, characterizations and applications of well-crystalline 2D-cerium oxide (CeO2) nanoflakes prepared by a rapid and facile solution combustion process. The nanoflakes were characterized in detail and applied as photocatalyst for dye-degradation and as an efficient electron mediator to fabricate high-sensitive hydroquinone chemical sensor. The detailed characterizations revealed that the prepared nanoflakes were well-crystalline and grown in very high-density. The synthesized CeO2 nanoflakes exhibited good photocatalytic activity toward the photocatalytic degradation of direct red-23 dye. Further, the synthesized nanoflakes were utilized as an efficient electron mediator to fabricate reproducible and highly sensitive hydroquinone chemical sensor. The fabricated chemical sensor exhibited a reproducible and reliable sensitivity of 2.04μAmM(-1)cm(-2) and the detection limit of 2.914μM with the correlation coefficient (R) of 0.98815 and good linearity from 78μM to 12.5mM. The observed results confirmed that the CeO2 nanoflakes can efficiently be used for photocatalytic and sensing applications.