Study of Natural and Synthetic Zeolites as Gas Sensors

Abstract

Rapidly growing and advancing technology is grabbing and robbing the beautiful nature very fast and greedily. The toxic and hazardous gases, major pollutants, are being released in the environment. These pollutants, which are not only undesirable, dangerous but also detrimental to the environment, lead to global warming, acid rain, and smog. Therefore, environmental pollution has become one of the global hot issues as it adversely affects on living being. In order to safe guard public health and mainly environment, strict regulations governing pollution are established. For the implementation of these regulations and to identify and to control the amount of pollutants, cost effective, innovative, environment friendly sensors are essential. Therefore sensors, capable of detecting hazardous pollutants, have received great attention. newlineAmong various sensors, ethanol sensors, have been the main focus of research in recent years for their applications in wide range of areas like chemical, pharmaceutical, biomedical and food industries, beverages quality monitoring, environmental monitoring, indoor air quality and breath analysis. Because of great demand in diverse fields, there is increasing need of new cost effective ethanol sensors for fast, continuous, and trace detection of ethanol vapors with features like high sensitivity, high selectivity, high stability, low working temperature, fast response and recovery times and reproducible response characteristics. Most of the materials used so far to meet these demands, belong to three categories namely polymers, ceramics and semiconductors. However, the percentage production of new gas sensing materials still lags behind to the actual requirements. Therefore search for new ethanol sensor materials is still needed with novel structural and atomic properties such as zeolites. newlineZeolites are crystalline, porous aluminosilicate with large structural cavities or cages and definite entry channels. SiO4 tetrahedron and AlO4 tetrahedron, building units, are linked together by sharing