Qu Zhou, Zhaorui Lu, Zhijie Wei
May 30, 2018
Citations
3
Influential Citations
42
Citations
Journal
Frontiers in Chemistry
Abstract
Methane (CH4), as a colorless and odorless gas, is the main component of natural gas and widely used in various industries and human daily life (Schoonbaert et al., 2015). However, the leakage of natural gas, oil and gas storage, transportation and distribution systems increase atmospheric CH4 concentration levels and lead to serious climate changes, which must be addressed (Zheng et al., 2017). Additionally, CH4 will be easy to explode in a range of concentration (5–15%). Therefore, it is necessary to develop rapid and accurate gas sensors for CH4 detection. Nickel oxide NiO (Sun et al., 2014) is a significant p-type semiconductor, and has been widely used as catalyst (Yu et al., 2015), lithium-ion battery (Gu et al., 2016; Long et al., 2018), gas sensor (Wang et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2018b), magnetic material (Cui et al., 2011), and so on. In recent years, many researchers have reported that NiO can be applied to fabricate high performance gas sensors for detecting some special gases such as hydrogen (Sta et al., 2016), NO2 (Hoa and El-Safty, 2011), ethanol (Miao et al., 2017), etc. Zhang et al. studied a methane gas sensor based on nickel oxide (NiO)/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanocomposite film, which exhibited a response of 15% toward 1000 ppm CH4 gas at 260 ◦C (Zhang et al., 2016), and the sensing response of the pure NiO film sensor only was 2.5% under the same condition.Moreover, few reports about the synthesis of hierarchical NiO nanostructures and its application for CH4 detection was reported recently. Thus, in this study we reported the successful synthesis of hierarchical ultrathin NiO nanoflakes and systematically researched their gas sensing properties to CH4. Interestingly, the proposed sensor exhibited high sensitivity, low optimal operating temperature, good linear relationship and excellent selectivity to CH4.