Development of CdO/ZnO nanocomposites for the rapid detection and discrimination of n-butanol

Hybrid metal oxide nanocomposites (NCs) show promising ascribe in the field of gas sensor due to the formation of hetero or homo junction between different materials. In present paper, we report the preparation of heterostructured CdO/ZnO NCs via two step process (co-precipitation followed by sol-gel dip coating) and demonstrate their gas sensing performance towards n-butanol gas. The structural study results confirmed that the CdO (cubic structure) –ZnO (hexagonal wurtzite (HW) structure) composite is formed with the absences of alloys phase. The size of CdO/ZnO NC was estimated by using high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM). The size of nanocomposite is around 45 nm. The morphology studies evidenced that gas sensor were found to be highly poroused. The gas sensing performance prepared gas sensors were tested for different gases and suspected that CdO/ZnO NCs based sensor shown excellent gas sensing performance towards the n-butanol.