Gas sensitive nanostructured films are synthesized by direct flame spray pyrolysis. I use this process to particularly fabricate various semiconduting materials composed of inorganic materials various applications. This process is facile, fast and can be used for mass production of nanomaterials. The thickness of the film is controlled by the deposition time.

Surface and bulk oxygen vacancies play an important role in metal oxide function. They generally increase the concentration of surface adsorbed oxygen and thus modify the baseline resistance of the sensing device. In this project, I am trying to create oxygen vacancies in thick films to investigate the role of bulk oxygen vacancies through a variation in their concentration and distribution on room temperature and low-powered gas sensing devices. The oxygen vacancies would be created not only on the surface but also throughout the porous layer of a metal oxides.

Pure metal oxide based gas sensors have the problems of lower responses and worse selectivity. To improve the sensitivity and selectivity, nano heterojunctions can be used instead of a single metal oxide sensing layer. In this project, I am investigating the nano heterojunctions effect on the sensing properties of an n-type and p-type Semiconductors. Furthermore, the role of bulk oxygen vacancies would also be investigated in thick layers metal oxides throught the variation in their concentration and distribution throughout a porous nano heterojunctions based sensing layer.

This project is sponsored by NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme and is a part of Advanced Electro-Optical Chemical Sensors (AMOXES).
AMOXES is a Multi-Year Project (MYP) supported by NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme (SPS), which has the main goal to prepare an innovative electro-optical chemical nano-sensor, never tried so far, that combines two different transduction principles on a single device: i) one conventional conductometric MOX sensor and ii) an optical sensor based on Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR) effect excited in the MOX nanostructures.