Enhanced Gas Sensing of Tin Dioxide Based Sensor for Indoor Formaldehyde Application

Indoor formaldehyde detection is of great important at present. Using efficient solvothermal method, nanosheet-constructed and nanorod-constructed hierarchical tin dioxide (SnO2) microspheres were successfully synthesized in this work and used for the gas sensing material for indoor formaldehyde application. The as-prepared two kinds of SnO2 gas sensing materials were applied to fabricate the gas sensors and formaldehyde gas sensing experiments were carried out. The HCHO gas sensing tests indicate that the gas response of the nanosheet-constructed SnO2 microspheres is about 1.7 times higher than that of the nanorod-constructed SnO2 microspheres. In addition, both of the two SnO2 based gas sensors show almost fast response and recovery time to HCHO gas. For the nanosheet-constructed microspheres, the response value is estimated to be 32.0 at 350 degrees C to 60 ppm formaldehyde gas, while the response and recovery times are 7 and 5 s, respectively. The simple and efficient preparation method and improved gas sensing properties show that the as-synthesized hierarchical SnO2 microsphere that is constructed by a large amount of nanosheets exhibits significant potential application for the indoor formaldehyde sensing.