Hierarchical morphology-dependent gas-sensing performances have been demonstrated for three-dimensional SnO nanostructures. First, hierarchical SnO nanostructures assembled with ultrathin shuttle-shaped nanosheets have been synthesized via a facile and one-step hydrothermal approach. Due to thermal instability of hierarchical nanosheets, they are gradually shrunk into cone-shaped nanostructures and finally deduced into rod-shaped ones under a thermal treatment. Given the intrinsic advantages of three-dimensional hierarchical nanostructures, their gas-sensing properties have been further explored. The results indicate that their sensing behaviors are greatly related with their hierarchical morphologies. Among the achieved hierarchical morphologies, three-dimensional cone-shaped hierarchical SnO nanostructures display the highest relative response up to about 175 toward 100 ppm of acetone as an example. Furthermore, they also exhibit good sensing responses toward other typical volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Microstructured analyses suggest that these results are mainly ascribed to the formation of more active surface defects and mismatches for the cone-shaped hierarchical nanostructures during the process of thermal recrystallization. Promisingly, this surface-engineering strategy can be extended to prepare other three-dimensional metal oxide hierarchical nanostructures with good gas-sensing performances.

Porous and single-crystalline ZnO nanobelts have been prepared through annealing precursors of ZnSe · 0.5N2H4 well-defined and smooth nanobelts, which have been synthesized via a simple hydrothermal method. The composition and morphology evolutions with the calcination temperatures have been investigated in detail for as-prepared precursor nanobelts, suggesting that they can be easily transformed into ZnO nanobelts by preserving their initial morphology via calcination in air. In contrast, the obtained ZnO nanobelts are densely porous, owing to the thermal decomposition and oxidization of the precursor nanobelts. More importantly, the achieved porous ZnO nanobelts are single-crystalline, different from previously reported ones. Motivated by the intrinsic properties of the porous structure and good electronic transporting ability of single crystals, their gas-sensing performance has been further explored. It is demonstrated that porous ZnO single-crystalline nanobelts exhibit high response and repeatability toward volatile organic compounds, such as ethanol and acetone, with a short response/recovery time. Furthermore, their optoelectronic behaviors indicate that they can be promisingly employed to fabricate photoelectrochemical sensors.