Highly Sensitive and Selective Detection of Long-Chain Alcohol Vapors Based on Keel-Type ZnO Fibers Derived from Waste Cigarette Butts
Tianci Shao, Lizhu Liu, Yanan Li, Xian‐Fa Zhang, Zhao‐Peng Deng, Li-Hua Huo, Shan Gao
Abstract
Rapid detection of long-chain alcohol vapors with high energy is highly desirable owing to their inflammable and explosive properties. However, chemoresistive sensors based on metal oxides have been seldom investigated to date. In this paper, keel-type ZnO fibers are simply and massively prepared from a waste cigarette butt template, and we also investigate the impact of calcination temperature on the microstructure of ZnO and its sensing performance. The hierarchical structure of ZnO-500 obtained by calcination at 500 °C is composed of uniformly cross-linking nanoparticles. Its unique grooves and meso- and macroporosities accelerate the rapid diffusion and adsorption of the target gas, thus endowing ZnO-500 with a prominent sensing performance to long-chain alcohol vapors together with the synergism of template imprinting. The ZnO-500 sensor exhibits a high response (S = 285) and a short response time (Tres = 2.3 s) to 100 ppm n-hexanol vapors at 252 °C. Meanwhile, it also shows a fast response and a good linear relationship toward other alcohol vapors with alkyl chains of different lengths, and its detection limit is the lowest among those reported for ZnO-based sensors. Therefore, the sensor fabricated from the ZnO-500 material has a certain differential ability to detect the same concentration of diverse long-chain alcohols vapors.