WO₃ Nanoflakes Coupled with Hexagonal Boron Nitride Nanosheets for Triethylamine Sensing

Design of hybrid metal/semiconductor nanocomposites provides a flexible strategy for exploring effective chemiresistive gas sensors. Herein, an extremely sensitive gas sensing material for the detection of triethylamine (TEA) is designed by coupling WO3 nanoflakes on 2D functionalized hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) nanosheets. The chemical composition and morphological structure of the obtained materials were explored in detail through inimitable analytical techniques, such as XRD, FT-IR, XPS, SEM, TEM, and AFM. Meanwhile, the gas sensing performance of this WO3/h-BN nanostructure has been further comprehensively investigated, and the results reveal that the amount of h-BN has a significant impact on the sensor properties. The WO3/h-BN miniature sensor with a h-BN content of 5 wt % exhibits the most outstanding response to 500 ppm of TEA, attaining 390.6, which is almost 2.2-fold higher than that of pristine WO3 (182.2) at 260 °C, and showing the excellent selectivity and repeatability. Such salient features can be attributed to a large specific surface area of functionalized h-BN for effective chemical reactions and the formation of interfacial heterojunctions bound to WO3, demonstrating the potential application of load h-BN in the future to study high-performance gas sensors.