A stable and highly sensitive room-temperature liquefied petroleum gas sensor based on nano-cubes/cuboids of zinc antimonate.

Trirutile zinc antimonate (ZnSbO) nano-cubes/cuboids have been fabricated by a sol-gel spin-coating method using polyethylene glycol (PEG) as the structure-directing agent. The fabricated films were characterized for surface morphology, along with structural, FT-IR and thermal analysis. The crystallite size of ZnSbO is found to be 35 nm. The fabricated films have been tested for the detection of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and carbon dioxide (CO) gas leakage at room temperature (27 °C). They exhibit fairly high sensitivity (1.73), low response and recovery times (∼41 and 95 s, respectively), and good reproducibility and stability (99.2%) at room temperature for the detection of LPG leakage. Based on these observations, the fabricated film has the potential to be used as a LPG sensor at room temperature.