Invito a Presentazione Orale in Nano M&D, 2019 (Electrospun nanocomposite nanofibers in chemical sensors for gaseous compounds)

Environmental monitoring is a world growing need owing to the strong impact of several anthropogenic activities on both human and planet health. Air quality monitoring is generally performed with specialized equipment and analytical methods by regulatory agencies and researchers. However, in order to obtain more realistic and continuous results on the situation of pollutants distribution, EU projects guidelines report the need to involve also citizens in environmental monitoring, thus low-cost and easy-to-use technologies are required. To achieve this aim, innovative sensors for environmental monitoring have been designed and fabricated to date to obtain reliable values comparable to those provided by standard methods and technologies. Among the main drivers for the design of advanced chemical sensors, the key characteristics include sensitivity, selectivity, and rapid responses. Over the last decade, the combination of nanostructured materials with many transducers has boosted the advances in this area, leading to significant enhancements in their sensing performance. These joint materials benefit from the synergy between doping agents (metal nanoparticles/rods/stars, metal oxide-nanoparticles/rods, quantum dots/rods, organic macromolecules, etc.) and the hosting nanostructures (i.e. polymer, metal-oxide, etc.): they are both on similar length scales and with a very large interfacial surface area when compared to the volume of the resulting material. Currently, electrospinning is considered as one of the most versatile and inexpensive manufacturing technologies to design and develop nanostructured sensors to detect gases and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air. Sensors based on polymeric as well as metal-oxide fibers look extremely attractive for the low cost and great versatility of the raw materials that can be easily tunable, according to the transducer used and the application of interest, taking part to the resulting sensing features (selectivity and sensitivity). The inclusion of variously working nanoparticles with different strategies of functionalization has allowed the sensors to achieve excellent performances under various points of view, ranging from robustness, to life-time, to sensitivity and selectivity. Some experiences will be here described.