Nowadays, the increased emission of hazardous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) due to rapid growth in the manufacturing industry has enforced demand for highly sensitive, selective, and stable gas sensors. Among the different types of gas sensors, we resolved issues associated with chemoresistive alcohol sensors like low selectivity, temperature instability, and long-term instability using iodine-doped polyvinyl acetate (IPVAc) films. These polymer-based chemoresistive sensors will be beneficial for low power consumption, ease of manufacture, and long-term stability owing to their simple structure and operation. The polymer films were prepared using the inductively coupled tubular plasma polymerization method. These films were doped with iodine at room temperature. The physicochemical characterization of prepared films confirmed the uniform coating of granular type morphology, iodine doping, and cubical crystal structure. The obtained maximum sensitivity was 122 and 7360 a.u. for 1000 ppm of methanol gas for polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) and IPVAc films, respectively. Also, IPVAc films demonstrated sensitivities of 5554 and 1995 a.u. for 1000 ppm of each ethanol and 2-propanol gas, respectively. IPVAc films illustrated the highest selectivity of 600 a.u. for alcohols over other VOCs like acetone, benzene, toluene, and dichloromethane. The high electronegativity of IPVAc films due to iodine doping is the key origin of the highly selective adsorption of VOCs. Additionally, the IPVAc films have stable sensitivity performance over the temperature range of 30−130 °C and repeatability over 60 days. Thus, the plasma-polymerized IPVAc films can be applied for fabricating highly selective, sensitive, and stable VOC sensing applications.

Industrialization has led to an increasing need for specific and selective gas sensors in the past few decades. Environmental monitoring of certain volatile compounds such as ammonia is necessary. Advancements in the food storage sector have created the need for cheap and effective amine chemosensors. Classical chemosensors still face several issues, such as a lack of selectivity and low sensitivity toward ammonia and amines. Sensitivity is defined as the relative change in response expressed in percentage. In this work, we have resolved a few issues associated with the ammonia and amine sensors, such as low selectivity, long-term instability, and unreliability under higher temperatures using plasma-polymerized thiophene (PPTh) reduced graphene oxide (rGO) composite films. PPTh films were prepared using RF plasma polymerization with optimized deposition parameters. Several samples were evaluated for their sensing response to understand the optimal PPTh and rGO ratio in the PPTh-rGO composite. These composite PPTh-rGO films have shown 4 times higher sensitivity for ammonia/amines than individual PPTh and rGO films. Ammonia, methylamine (MA), dimethylamine (DMA), and trimethylamine (TMA) were primary analytes and tested for sensing response of the PPTh-rGO composite. The sensitivity measured ranges from 1328 for trimethylamine to 2354 for methylamine at 1000 ppm. The order of sensitivity was found to be MA > Ammonia > DMA > TMA. Polymer swelling, reduced charge carriers, and disruption of conductive pathways can explain possible sensing mechanisms. PPTh-rGO composite films have shown selectivity as high as 110 for ammonia/amine over other commonly used volatile organic compounds. The sensing response of these films is stable for any temperature fluctuations from 30 °C to 150 °C. Additionally, films showed stable sensitivity for over 4 months. Thus, composite films of PPTh-rGO can be effectively used to develop highly selective and stable gas sensors for the environmental monitoring of ammonia/amines.