Room-Temperature Chemiresistive Gas Sensing of SnO2 Nanowires: A Review

Innovative chemiresitive gas sensors with strong sensing qualities that operate at room temperature are much more appealing due to their properties of long-life cycle, high stability, and lower usage of power. As we know, n-type semiconducting metal oxide like SnO2 received a lot of interest for its gas sensing applications. The rapid progress of different synthesis processes has allowed researchers to investigate a wide range of new nanostructures and their incorporation into smart gas sensing devices. Generally, conventional metal oxide-based sensors are functioned at very high a temperature, which causes high power consumption and low selectivity. Therefore, to remove this issue, metal oxides doped with various nanostructures are the first choice due to their advantages: high surface-area-to-volume ratio, efficient electron transfer, improved and adjustable surface reactivity, and quick access response time, and short recovery time. In this review, we have discussed the preparation of SnO2 nanowires through various methods and discussed the state of the art of vapour or gas sensors based on tin oxide nanowires and can exhibit sensing properties at room temperature. An overview of the wealth of material, methods, and sensing mechanisms like response time, analytical ranges, and operating temperatures are also explained. In the last section, we discussed the current status and challenges and depicted the potential future aspects.