Gas-Sensing And Photocatalytic Properties Of Semiconductor Metal Oxide Nanomaterials Prepared Via Electrospinning

Recently, gas-sensing and photocatalysis used as the techniques of monitoring and decomposing pollutants have been extensively applied in environmental protection and remediation. Thus, materials used for sensors or photocatalysts have attracted more and more interests. Semiconductor metal oxide(SMO) with One-dimensional(1D) and Quasi-one-dimensional(Q-1D) nanostructure exhibits marvelous performance in the two fields mentioned above due to their special electronic configuration and high specific surface area making transferring of ions, electrons, photons, gases, and fluids easily.In the dissertation, La1-xSrxFeO3nanofibers/nanobelts were fabricated by traditional electrospinning. Meanwhile, a series of semiconductor metal oxides with special morphologies and electronic structures were prepared through improvement of spun device or electrospinning united with other methods. SnO2/ZnO, NiO/ZnO, NiO/TiO2nanofibers with parallel-axial structure were fabricated by a shoulder-to-shoulder spun device. Hierarchical flower-like SnO2microstructures were obtained by manipulating the humidity and aging time of the [SnCl4/PVP] as-spun nanofibers. Comb-like NiO/TiO2composite nanofibers was prepared via electrospinning combined with hydrothermal process. X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive spectrometer (EDS) were utilized to characterize the as-synthesized samples.The sensing properties of the as-prepared materials to ethanol were tested by JF02E gas sensing system. La0.6Sr0.4FeO3nanobelts exhibit higher sensitivity and faster respondence. The SMO with special morphologies and electronic structures performed better sensitivity than the traditional nanomaterials. The photocatalytic activities of SnO2/ZnO and flower-like SnO2microstructures were investigated by taking rhodamine B as degradation agent. The results demonstrated that the formation of heterojunction and specific morphologies in these samples could enhance photocatalytic properties.