Highly selective and ultra-low power consumption metal oxide based hydrogen gas sensor employing graphene oxide as molecular sieve

The excellent gas sensing performance of metal oxide based nano- and microstructures, including a fast response time and good sensitivity, is typically limited by their low selectivity. Therefore, novel approaches and strategies are required to gain a precise control of the selectivity. Here, we introduce a nanoporous few-layer graphene oxide (GO) membrane with permeability only to specific gas molecules to improve the selectivity of individual zinc oxide microwires (ZnO MWs) toward hydrogen (H-2) gas. The fabricated GO-covered ZnO MWs showed ultra-low power consumption (60-200 nW) and an excellent room temperature H-2 gas sensing properties with fast response (114 s) and recovery (30 s) times, and a low detection limit of similar to 4 ppm, while no gas response was measured to all other tested gases. As proposed, the gas sensing mechanism is based on selective sieving of H-2 gas molecules through the GO membrane and further diffusion to the Schottky contacts, resulting in a decreased barrier height. Being based on a bottom-up fabrication approach, the presented results could have great potential for further technological applications such as high-performance and highly selective ultra-low power metal oxide-based gas sensors, opening new opportunities for the design of nanosensors and their integration in wireless and portable devices.