Synthesis, characterization, and comparative gas sensing properties of tin dioxide nanoflowers and porous nanospheres

Abstract Self-assembly of lower nanostructures into 3D superstructures is extensively investigated because of their excellent physicochemical properties. In this study, the hierarchical SnO 2 nanostructures were prepared via two simple hydrothermal methods. The SnO 2 nanostructures were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), surface area analyzer (using BET method), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The SEM, TEM results revealed that the hierarchical SnO 2 flowers were assembled by numerous one-dimensional tetragonal prism nanorods and the sphere architectures were formed by numerous smaller particles. The gas sensing results demonstrated that the different SnO 2 nanostructures have great effect on the gas sensing behavior. The nanoflowers exhibited higher sensitivities to ethanol than the nanospheres, whereas the typical responses of these sensors to H 2 and LPG indicated that the porous spheres demonstrated better sensing performance than the hierarchical flowers. This interesting phenomenon contributes to clearly understand about morphology-dependent gas sensing properties.