Tuning Morphological Structure of Ag/QRs/PMMA Blend Fibers to Enhance theResponse of Volatile Organic Compounds

摘要

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) sensing materials which are indispensable for environmental monitoring, and they can be used to detect the harmful VOCs and to prevent excessive VOCs exposure. The electrospinning technique is widely used to fabricate alarge quantity of sub-microscale or nanoscale sensing fibers. The nanostructured VOC sensing fibers have been adopted to achieve high response due to their high surface area. In this study, we developed the novel VOC fibrous sensing materials consisted of silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs), CdSe/CdS quantum rods (QRs) and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). In order to enhance the response of VOC fibrous sensing materials, Ag/QR/PMMA fibrous sensing materials treated with the different time of ultraviolet-ozone (UV/ozone) surface etching. We varied the UV/ozone treatment's time and polarization behavior of Ag/QR/PMMA fibrous sensing materials to enhance the VOCs sensitivity. The rotation angle of 60 degrees and UV/ozone treatment of 60 minutes are the optimal parameters in this study. The Ag/QR/PMMA fibrous sensing materials can efficiently detect the lower explosive limit for VOCs, and it can achieve the detection limit of butanol and chlorobenzene at100 ppm and 500 ppm, respectively. Our Ag/QR/PMMA fibrous film developed in the present work extends the current VOCs sensing technology. It can be extensively used to protect humans and the environment from VOCs potential risks.