Boosting Ethylene Glycol Sensing Performance with Dendritic Hierarchical CuO/Co<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> Heterojunction Nanowire
Chen Su, Mingyu Li, Yongfeng Zhang, Tianqing Liu, Cong Ren, Peipei Li, Xiaoqiang Yin, Lu Zhang, Min Zhang, Weiwei Wu
Abstract
Heterostructures comprising metal oxide semiconductors (MOSs) have proven to be effective techniques in the development of high-performance gas sensors. In this study, we developed a feasible hydrothermal technique for the synthesis of a hierarchical dendritic CuO/Co 3 O 4 nanowire heterostructure, which exhibits a strong affinity for ethylene glycol (EG) adsorption. The resulting gas sensor, based on a hierarchical CuO/Co 3 O 4 heterostructure, has an exceptionally high response (6.3) to 100 ppm EG at 130 °C. The enhanced sensing performance toward EG can be attributed to the formation of a unique CuO/Co 3 O 4 core–shell heterojunction structure. The mechanism behind this enhanced performance is explained by the heterojunction-depletion model, which takes into account precise band alignments. This study serves as inspiration for the design of various p–p heterojunctions in the development of high-performance gas sensors. A feasible hydrothermal technique was developed for obtaining a hierarchical dendritic CuO/Co 3 O 4 nanowire heterostructure with high EG gas sensing performance.