The detection of carbon dioxide (CO2) is critical for environmental monitoring, chemical safety control, and many industrial applications. The manifold application fields as well as the huge range of CO2 concentration to be measured make CO2 sensing a challenging task. Thus, the ability to reliably and quantitatively detect carbon dioxide requires vastly improved materials and approaches that can work under different environmental conditions. Due to their unique favorable chemical, optical, physical, and electrical properties, nanomaterials are considered state-of-the-art sensing materials. This mini-review documents the advancement of nanomaterial-based CO2 sensors in the last two decades and discusses their strengths, weaknesses, and major applications. The use of nanomaterials for CO2 sensing offers several improvements in terms of selectivity, sensitivity, response time, and detection, demonstrating the advantage of using nanomaterials for developing high-performance CO2 sensors. Anticipated future trends in the area of nanomaterial-based CO2 sensors are also discussed in light of the existing limitations.
Keywords: CO2 monitoring; gas sensing; nanomaterials.