Conductometric n-butanol gas sensor based on Tourmaline@ZnO hierarchical micro-nanostructures

Abstract The combinative strategy of metal oxide hybridized with other material to build up an effective heterojunction provides a promising route for the well development of the electronic devices. In this research, a conductometric sensor based on unique Tourmaline@ZnO core-shell structure for gas detection was successfully realized by synthesis of uniform precipitation and post-heat treatment. The structure, morphology, surface and energy band of the obtained sensing composites were successively characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, BET, XPS and UV–vis analysis. The measuring results revealed a hierarchical grain-sheet-flower micro-nanostructure. Compared with pure ZnO, the Tourmaline@ZnO revealed larger specific surface area, richer oxygen vacancies and narrower band gap. Moreover, the gas sensing tests demonstrated that the core-shelled composites exhibited an excellent gas sensitivity to n-butanol, the sensor made from 1%Tourmaline@ZnO achieved the optimized performance as high as 120.84 to 100 ppm n-butanol that of 5 times more than other gases, additionally with the shortest response and recovery time. The introduction of tourmaline core exerted certain effects on the carrier migration and transmission performance, the micro-nanostructured Tourmaline@ZnO has confirmed to be a potential candidate for the detection of n-butanol and may play an important role in designing and fabricating highly efficient electronic sensors.