Gas-Sensing Performance of Gadolinium Ferrates with Rod and Butterfly Morphologies

Abstract

There is an urgent need to develop a low-cost and high-performance gas sensor for industrial production and daily life. Perovskite-type oxides are appropriate materials for resistive gas sensors. In this paper, two gas-sensing materials of gadolinium orthoferrite (GdFeO3) with rod and butterfly morphologies were obtained by annealing the corresponding precursors at 800 °C in a muffle furnace for 3 h. The precursors of GdFe(CN)6·4H2O with novel morphologies were prepared by a co-precipitation method at room temperature. The materials were evaluated in terms of their structure, morphology, and gas-sensing performance. The gas sensor based on GdFeO3 rods showed a better sensing performance than the sensor based on GdFeO3 butterflies. It exhibited the largest response value of 58.113 to 100 ppm n-propanol at a relatively low operating temperature of 140 °C, and the detection limit was 1 ppm. The results show that the GdFeO3 rods-based sensor performed well in detecting low concentration n-propanol. The satisfactory gas-sensing performance of the GdFeO3 rods-based sensor may be due to the porous structure and the large percentages of defect oxygen and adsorbed oxygen (37.5% and 14.6%) on the surface. This study broadens the application of GdFeO3 in the gas sensor area.