Ultrathin Tungsten Oxide Nanowires/Reduced Graphene Oxide Composites for Toluene Sensing

Muhammad Hassan; Zhi-Hua Wang; Wei-Ran Huang; Min-Qiang Li; Jian-Wei Liu; Jia-Fu Chen

doi:10.3390/s17102245

Ultrathin Tungsten Oxide Nanowires/Reduced Graphene Oxide Composites for Toluene Sensing

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Sep 29;17(10):2245. doi: 10.3390/s17102245.

Authors

Muhammad Hassan¹, Zhi-Hua Wang², Wei-Ran Huang³, Min-Qiang Li⁴, Jian-Wei Liu⁵, Jia-Fu Chen⁶

Affiliations

¹ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, China. mhassan@mail.ustc.edu.cn.
² Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, China. wzhua@mail.ustc.edu.cn.
³ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, China. huangwr@mail.ustc.edu.cn.
⁴ Nanomaterials & Environment Detection Laboratory, Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 230031 Hefei, China. mqli@iim.ac.cn.
⁵ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, China. jwliu13@ustc.edu.cn.
⁶ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, China. jfchen@ustc.edu.cn.

Abstract

Graphene-based composites have gained great attention in the field of gas sensor fabrication due to their higher surface area with additional functional groups. Decorating one-dimensional (1D) semiconductor nanomaterials on graphene also show potential benefits in gas sensing applications. Here we demonstrate the one-pot and low cost synthesis of W₁₈O₄₉ NWs/rGO composites with different amount of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) which show excellent gas-sensing properties towards toluene and strong dependence on their chemical composition. As compared to pure W₁₈O₄₉ NWs, an improved gas sensing response (2.8 times higher) was achieved in case of W₁₈O₄₉ NWs composite with 0.5 wt. % rGO. Promisingly, this strategy can be extended to prepare other nanowire based composites with excellent gas-sensing performance.

Keywords: W18O49 nanowires; nanocomposites; toluene sensing; ultrathin nanowires.