Humidity-resistant hydrogen sensors based on rare-earth-doped tin dioxide nanofibers with hydrophobic mesoporous silica sieve encapsulation

Air humidity is a major factor that degrades the performance and long-term stability of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) based gas sensors. In this work, we propose an encapsulation strategy by coating a mesoporous silica molecular sieve (SBA-15) on rare earth doped tin oxide (RE-SnO₂) nanofibers for humidity-resistant hydrogen detection. In this design, the hydrophobic SBA-15 sieve layer effectively blocks the water molecules without affecting hydrogen diffusion, while the RE dopant greatly improves the responsivity and lowers down the operating temperature of the sensors, As a result, the Er-SnO₂/SBA-15 and Tb-SnO₂/SBA-15 sensors respectively show the maximum response values of 27.71 and 33.68 (to 10 ppm hydrogen at 280 °C, 4.67 and 5.67 times that of the bare SnO₂ ones, respectively), short response/recovery time (< 1.0 s / < 1.0 s), as well as a low limit of detection for hydrogen (200 ppb) and a good gas selectivity. Under the protection of the SBA-15 sieve layer, the response retention of the sensors is significantly improved when the humidity increases from 25% to 85% RH (Er-doping, from 38.8% to 60.0%; Tb-doping, form 25.6–57.8%). Besides, further analysis on enhancement mechanism of response indicates that the SBA-15 coating contribute about 1/3 of the response enhancements via its own hydrogen physical adsorption capacity and the induced oxygen vacancies during the calcination processes.