Functional Nanomaterials and Thin Films for Gas Sensing Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Recently, there have been continuously increasing demands for developing high-performance gas sensors in today’s smart cities, smart factories, and even smart healthcare applications. For example, NH₃ is well known as a gas that is harmful to human. Meanwhile, it is an exhaled biomarker in cancer diagnosis, and also needs to be monitored in the manufacturing environment. Likewise, some flammable, explosive, toxic and harmful gases, such as NOx, CO, SO₂, NH₃, and H₂S, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), also cause a serious threat to human health and environmental protection. Thus, the development of gas sensors is urgent.

In order to monitor the trace concentration of gases, gas sensors with high sensitivity, precise selectivity, rapidness and reliability are needed. Fundamentally, the substrates used to recognize a gas molecule are the most important factor in determining gas sensing performance. Among them, functional nanomaterials and thin films have received immense attention recently due to their advantages of easy functionalization, large specific surface areas, and abundant active adsorption sites, leading them to be considered promising gas sensing substrates for boosting the performance of gas sensors.

This Special Issue aims to demonstrate the recent progress in functional nanomaterials and thin films for high-performance gas sensing applications (including their design methodology, preparation process, sensing mechanism, surface/interface characterization, evaluation metrics, etc.). The format of welcomed articles includes original research articles and reviews. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The design and preparation of functional nanomaterials and thin films;
• The development of novel gas-sensitive nanomaterials;
• An elaboration of sensing mechanisms at the molecular level;
• The characterization of the gas–nanomaterial reaction interface;
• Highly sensitive and selective nanomaterial-based gas sensors.

Dr. Wei Li
Dr. Qiumeng Chen
Guest Editors

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