Chapter 11 - Nanostructured composite materials for advanced chemical sensors

Nanostructured sensing materials play a crucial role in the successful application of sensors for gaseous compounds, resulting from the increasingly growing demand of high performing sensing tools in various areas, ranging from medicine to agriculture and food, from indoor and outdoor environments to people safety and city control. This chapter deals with the most recent results achieved in the latest generation of the conductive sensors based on metal oxides and polymers, both the form of nanostructures and in combination with additional nanocomponents. It is an attempt to better comprehend the relationships between the physicochemical properties of the nanostructured materials, their three-dimensional architecture, analyte-material interfaces, and charge carrier changes, which are the key mechanisms of the described sensing processes.