Toward Ubiquitous Environmental Gas Sensors—Capitalizing on the Promise of Graphene

Abstract

Atomically thin sheets of carbon known as "graphene" have captured the imagination of much of the scientific world during the past few years. Although these single sheets of graphite were under our noses for years-within technologies ranging from the humble pencil, which has been around since at least 1565 (Petroski, H. The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance; Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1993), to modern nuclear reactors-graphene was merely considered as part of graphite's crystal structure until 2004, when Novoselov, Geim, and colleagues (Science 2004, 306, 666-669) first presented some of the surprising electrical properties of graphene layers they had isolated by mechanically peeling sheets off graphite crystals. Today, graphene's unique electronic structures and properties, bolstered by other intriguing properties discovered in the intervening years, threaten the dominance of carbon nanotubes, a more mature allotrope of carbon, in potential applications from electronics to sensors. In this review, we will consider the promise of graphene for producing small-scale gas sensors for environmental monitoring.

Controlled synthesis of transition metal dichalcogenide thin films for electronic applications

“…This low detection limit signifies that our MoS 2 sensor is a strong candidate for gas sensing applications. Functionalisation of the channel could engender selectivity in our device, as has been observed previously for other nanomaterial based sensors [44][45][46]. Sensors such as this, whereby a particular analyte (e.g.…”

“…Electronic gas sensors, based on 1D and 2D nanomaterials in a field effect transistor (FET) configuration, have shown considerable promise [41][42][43]. Improvements in their sensitivity and selectivity have continuously been demonstrated through covalent or non-covalent functionalisation [44][45][46]. As a semiconducting analogue of graphene, which has demonstrated single molecule detection [43], 2D MoS 2 is an exciting candidate for future sensors.…”

Controllable Synthesis of Graphene by Plasma‐Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition and Its Related Applications

“…Recently, graphene based materials have been widely studied for sensing applications, e.g., in strain sensors,52, 141, 142, 143 temperature sensors,144 biosensors,145, 146, 147, 148 and gas sensors,72, 81, 149 as shown in Figure 19 . Nanographene films grown by PECVD have been transferred onto polydimethylsilxane (PDMS) with prestrain 51.…”

Graphene–metal oxide nanohybrids for toxic gas sensor: A review

“…[22] In addition, 2D materials can screen charge fluctuations better than one-dimensional materials like CNT etc. [23] Perhaps, the most important reason why graphene has been considered as a promising gas sensing material is that its electronic properties are strongly affected by the adsorption of gas molecules. According to its discoverers, "Graphene has the ultimate sensitivity because in principle it cannot be beaten -you cannot get more sensitive than a single molecule."…”