A novel sensitive gas sensor based on SnO2 molecularly imprinted polymers for monitoring isopropanol

Isopropanol is one of the most important chemical raw materials and organic solvents, but a large amount of isopropanol will do harm to human health. Therefore, it is essential to monitor isopropanol. In this work, high-performance isopropanol gas sensors were fabricated with SnO2 molecularly imprinted polymers (SnO2 MIPs). All the samples were characterized for performance evaluation. The results show that with molecular imprinting (MI) modification, gas sensors based on SnO2 MIPs have better gas sensing performance for isopropanol compared with pure SnO2. Especially, when the molar ratio of methacrylic acid (MAA) to isopropanol was 6:10, excellent gas sensing performance was achieved. At the optimum working temperature of 300 degrees C, the response of this sensor to isopropanol of 500 ppm was 33.87, and the response and recovery times were 10 s and 3 s, respectively. In addition, it is proven that MI modification could significantly improve the selectivity of gas sensors to the target gas due to the specific recognition sites. Therefore, SnO2 MIPs with the molar ratio of MAA to isopropanol of 6:10 would be a promising isopropanol sensing material.