Gas transport regulation in a MO/MOF interface for enhanced selective gas detection

Abstract

The important application of metal oxides (MOs) as a chemiresistive sensing material can be severely hampered by their poor selectivity towards analyte molecules that possess a similar sensing activity. In this work, a new metal oxide@metal–organic framework (MO@MOF) core–sheath nanowire array material was prepared. Using a post-synthetic modification of the pore size in the MOF sheath, the channel traffic of the analyte molecules with a similar sensing activity but different kinetic diameter was successfully modulated, which profoundly enhanced the selectivity of the MOs. As a result, the materials obtained showed the highest selective response to acetone in the presence of benzene in all the reported materials.