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Toward practical gas sensing with rapid recovery semiconducting carbon nanotube film sensors

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Abstract

Nanomaterials have been considered as promising materials to construct highly sensitive and miniaturized gas sensors due to their high ratio of surface to volume, but almost all of the reported nanomaterials based resistive gas sensors are difficult to use in the practical system mainly owing to the long recovery time and non-equilibrium state at room temperature. Here, we demonstrate a gate assistant technology to realize the rapid recovery to an equilibrium state in semiconducting carbon nanotube (CNT) thin-film gas sensors and promote the CNT-based gas sensors to reach the practical application level. Specifically, we construct highly uniform gas sensors based on semiconducting solution-derived CNT film and accelerate the gas molecules desorption by applying a voltage on the back gate (substrate), which is named gate-assistant recovery technology. By combining the gate-assistant recovery technology and a modified concentration calculation method, highly reproducible detection systems have been realized by using a custom-built printed circuit board (PCB) based data acquisition circuits to execute a real-time rapid detection of H2 in the air at room temperature, and especially exhibits a record response time of 9 s and recovery time of 50 s under a resolution of 10 ppm, which outperformed previous low dimensional nanomaterials based portable H2 detection systems. The gate-assistant rapid recovery and related concentration calculation technologies are helpful to promote the nanomaterials-based gas sensors to practical application for highly sensitive online gas detection.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research & Development Program (Grant No. 2016YFA020-1901). The authors thank Dr. Zhongqiu HUA from Peking University for the constructive discussions.

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Author notes

  1. Liu F F, Xiao M M, and Ning Y K have the same contribution to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hunan Institute of Advanced Sensing and Information Technology, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, 411105, China

    Fangfang Liu, Shaoyuan Zhou, Jianping He & Zhiyong Zhang

  2. Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices and Center for Carbon-based Electronics, Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Mengmeng Xiao, Yanxia Lin & Zhiyong Zhang

  3. Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Yongkai Ning

Authors
  1. Fangfang Liu
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  2. Mengmeng Xiao
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  3. Yongkai Ning
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  4. Shaoyuan Zhou
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  5. Jianping He
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  6. Yanxia Lin
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Correspondence to Mengmeng Xiao or Zhiyong Zhang.

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Figures S1–S8. The supporting information is available online at info.scichina.com and link.springer.com. The supporting materials are published as submitted, without typesetting or editing. The responsibility for scientific accuracy and content remains entirely with the authors.

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Liu, F., Xiao, M., Ning, Y. et al. Toward practical gas sensing with rapid recovery semiconducting carbon nanotube film sensors. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 65, 162402 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-021-3286-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-021-3286-3

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