Facile synthesis of tortoise shell-like porous NiCo2O4 nanoplate with promising triethylamine gas sensing properties

Abstract Tortoise Shell-Like Porous NiCo2O4 nanoplates were synthesized and applied as sensing material to detect trimethylamine. Spinel structure porous NiCo2O4 can be obtained by calcination at 500 °C and showed best gas sensing properties of all as-prepared samples. The high specific surface area (102.6 m2 g−1) provided sufficient active sites for gas sensing and the nature of the compound assured the high response of 2.58 at low operating temperature of 220 °C to 10 ppm TEA. The increase of Ni (II)/Ni (III) ratio from 0.25 for fresh NiCo2O4-500 to 0.32 for TEA treated NiCo2O4-500 revealed that the gas sensing reaction occurred on the Ni site. This work provides an alternative approach for the production of porous functional materials and a new insight of the gas sensing mechanism.