Growth and humidity sensing properties of plate-like CuO nanostructures

This paper describes a simple, low-temperature and cost-effective liquid-phase method to synthesize homogenous plate-like CuO nanostructures and their sensitivity to humidity. Scanning electron microscopy illustrated that the synthesized CuO nanoplates have thicknesses of ~100 nm. X-ray diffraction measurements showed that the CuO nanostructures have high crystallinity with monoclinic crystal structure preferentially in and directions. From the temperature-dependant dark electrical resistivity measurements, the ionization energies of the impurity levels and thermal band gap energies of the films are found as 0.30, 0.32 and 1.37, 1.39 for as-synthesized and annealed films, respectively. Gas sensing characteristics of the films were investigated for different concentrations of humidity, isopropyl alcohol, methanol, ethanol, chloroform and acetone vapours. It was found that the sensor is sensitive to humidity but not to the other volatile organic compounds.