Engineering mesoporous semiconducting metal oxides from metal-organic frameworks for gas sensing

Chemiresistive gas sensors based on semiconducting metal oxides (SMOs) have been widely used in medical diagnosis, industrial production and aerospace vehicles. It’s challenging to develop gas sensor with high selectivity and low working temperature. Recently, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) derived SMOs have been regarded as a promising candidate for developing high-performance gas sensors owing to their mesoporous structure, unique morphology, tunable architectures and compositions. Great progresses have been made in design and synthesis of SMOs with different nanostructures and compositions using MOFs as a precursor. However, there are few reviews to summarize the progresses of this fast-growing area. In this review, we systematically summarize the recent developments in the field of MOFs-derived mesoporous SMOs with different architectures and compositions for gas sensing application. In particularly, the influence of structure and composition of SMOs on the sensing performance in terms of sensitivity, selectivity, response/recovery speed and working temperature are summarized. Strategies including constructing novel nanostructures, building heterojunctions, decorating with noble catalysts and combining with highly-conductive materials for enhancing the sensing performance are discussed in this review. Furthermore, the current challenges and prospects in the application of MOFs-derived mesoporous SMOs for sensing application are proposed. This review may provide a guideline for rational design and development of high-performance gas sensors using MOFs-derived SMOs.