Research Projects

Global warming is an important factor in today’s era. Environmental pollution and leakage of hazardous gases in nuclear and chemical industries etc. adds up to global warming. Some of the environmental pollutants have foul odours also. These pollutants cause global warming and on other hand affect human health directly by causing irritation/allergy. Now a day, it has become a big societal issue and has challenges survival of human being. But, due to the lack of appropriate and affordable technology/instruments monitoring and characterization of odour and odour causing pollutants are very limited. However, real-time monitoring of odour and/or odour causing pollutants viz., hydrogen sulphide, volatile organic carbons etc are vital to uphold human health and safety. To incorporate with increasing demands of gas sensors, metal oxide based nano sensors play an imperative role due to its high sensors response, fast response/recovery time, low power consumption, low operating temperature along with its nano scale fabrication and low manufacturing cost. Most commonly used metal oxide based semiconductors are n-type such as ZnO and SnO2. These gas sensors are highly sensible for both reducing gases like H2, H2S, CO, ethanol etc. and oxidizing gases such as O2, NO2. LFO (LaFeO3) based sensors have been reported for volatile organic compounds monitoring. With 1-dimentional nanostructure based sensors, fast response with high sensitivity at low operating temperature and cost effective fabrication is possible. Furthermore, enhancement of sensitivity to a large extent at low operating temperature can be achieved using doping of metal oxide, control of grain size in Schottky contacted gas sensors and post deposition techniques. Hence, in the present project metal oxide based 1-dimensional nanostructure sensors will be developed for measurements of odour and odour causing environmental pollutants, and developed technology will be transformed into product.