Synthesis, characterization, and applications of zinc oxide nanoparticles and nanorods in acetone gas detection

In this paper, we report an enhanced gas sensing performance of ZnO by changing the ZnO configuration from one dimension (1D) to zero dimension (0D). The structural and optical properties of the as-synthesized samples have been investigated by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), x-ray diffraction (XRD), UV–visible near infrared and photoluminescence spectroscopies (PL). TEM results confirm the non-agglomerated crystalline morphology of 0D ZnO nanoparticles as well as the 1D nanorods. All the representative peaks observed in the XRD spectrum confirm the hexagonal wurtzite structure. The UV–visible absorption and PL emission spectra for 0D ZnO nanoparticles indicate an obvious blue shift compared to the 1D nanorods because of its lower dimension size. Our dynamic response-recovery characterizations reveal that the 0D ZnO exhibits better acetone-gas sensing performance compared to 1D ZnO under an optimum operating temperature of 250 °C. (paper)