Characterization and NO2 gas sensing properties of spray pyrolyzed SnO2 thin films

- Rock like morphology of SnO2 were synthesized via the spray pyrolysis technique.
- The SnO2 exhibited excellent and highly selective gas response for NO2 gas at relatively low temperature i.e. 150 °C.
- The synthesis route and sensing behavior of as synthesized SnO2 revealed a promising candidate for fabricating low-consumption gas sensors.

The nanocrystalline tin oxide (SnO2) thin films were synthesized with varing precursor concentrations of the solution by spray pyrolysis technique for NO2 gas detection. The structural, morphological, optical and electrical properties of nanocrystalline SnO2 films were studied with XRD, SEM, UV-visible and two probe resistivity measurement setup. The XRD analysis shows SnO2 thin film has tetragonal rutile structure. From XRD analysis the crystallite size and dislocation density were determined by considering the full width at half maximum (FWHM) from the diffracted peaks. The crystallite size and dislocation density were varies between 4.796 nm to 11.563 nm and 7.484 × 1015 lines/m2 to 43.592 × 1015 lines/m2 respectively, while optical band gap energy found in the range of 3.40 eV to 4.06 eV. The gas sensing properties were studied using indigenously built gas sensing unit. The gas response of NO2 gas at 150 °C optimized operating temperature for 40 ppm is found to be 556, with recovery and response time is 48 s to 224 s and 100 s to 46 s respectively.