Speaker
Description
Air pollution represents a critical environmental threat, significantly degrading the ambient air quality through the presence of numerous atmospheric pollutants. Metal oxide semiconductor gas sensors are widely employed in gas sensing applications for the detection and analysis of lethal, explosive, and harmful gases. Even so, these metal oxide-based sensors still face a lot of restrictions such as high operating temperatures, high detection limits, low selectivity, low stability, and their sensitivity degrade quickly overtime. In this study, a hydrothermal method was used to fabricate simple two-dimensional (2D) multilayer nanomaterial gas sensors, designed to detect pollutants at relatively low concentrations, exhibit selectivity over various gases and demonstrate stability overtime. The proposed sensors are expected to simultaneously detect various gas analytes and identify low concentration analytes. This will be achieved through the incorporation of rare earth elements such as erbium (Er) and praseodymium (Pr). These elements possess a different atomic radii, Pr (1.13 Å) and Er (0.89 Å), meanwhile Cobalt (Co) and Nikel (Ni) exhibit comparable atomic radii of (0.82 Å) and (0.72 Å), respectively. It is expected that the loading of Pr will result into the formation of secondary phases, while Er, due to its atomic radius will be able to fit in into Co or Ni positions, thereby avoiding the formation of new phases. To identify optimal sensor performance, specific characterisation methods were employed. These methods include Braeuer-Emmett-Teller (BET), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Photoluminescence (PL), High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HR-TEM), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS).
| Apply for student award at which level: | MSc |
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| Consent on use of personal information: Abstract Submission | Yes, I ACCEPT |