2DEGAS
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Research project title: "Development of two-dimensional environmental gas nano-sensors with enhanced selectivity through fluctuation spectroscopy" (2DEGAS) |
Duration of the project:
24 months
Strategic emerging topic:
HUMAN WELLBEING
Cluster:
Health
Sub Cluster:
Living and working environments are health-promoting and sustainable thanks to better understanding of environmental, occupational, social and economic determinants of health.
Main ERC field
PE - Physical Sciences and Engineering
Brief Project Description
Sensor technology is extremely relevant in modern society for the monitoring of natural and artificial environments. There is a growing need for detection of toxic gases in healthcare, environmental pollution, and air quality, as well as in transportation and industrial processes. Carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), ammonia (NH3), and methane (CH4) gases are the major air pollutants. Each of them has recommended exposure limits because they negatively affect the environment and human health. The most promising solution for the next generation gas nano-sensors is the exploitation of two-dimensional (2D) materials as sensing elements with atomically thin structures, enormous surface area to volume ratio, and mechanical flexibility. Despite the high sensitivity, the major weakness of solid-state sensors is related to a lack of selectivity (i.e., detection of a single chemical species in a gaseous mixture), an obstacle to the development of high-quality sensors. Chemical selectivity could be boosted by operating an array of sensors, each of them having different sensitivity for different gases. However, the challenge in miniaturizing devices and lowering power consumption is to minimize the number of sensors required for gas-sensing applications. In this project, we will develop innovative 2D gas nano-sensors, for air pollution monitoring, with enhanced selectivity through fluctuation spectroscopy. With this approach, we aim to increase the amount of information provided by an individual sensor using advanced measurements, like fluctuation spectroscopy, promoting a step beyond the state-of-the-art in the field of environmental monitoring. Transition metal dichalcogenides (such as MoS2, WS2) will be used as conducting channels in field effect transistor (FET) nanodevices, to play the role of active material, as their electrical conductivity can show a clear response to the presence of gas molecules. Among the several device architectures, like chemi-resistors, -capacitors, -diodes, the FET implementations are the most interesting as they favor integrability with the existing semiconductor technology. Furthermore, the gate terminal in FET provides an extra knob for controlling the carrier mobilities, which helps to achieve a higher sensitivity compared to other devices. Both theoretical and experimental studies will be dedicated to the implementation of a sensing protocol to improve the selectivity of 2D gas nano-sensors by analyzing the power spectrum density of noise fluctuations in the presence of one or more gas. The objective is to increase the sensor selectivity by using noise as a sensing parameter, considering that the interaction between a gas sensor and the detected gas molecule carries a stochastic fingerprint of the chemicals interacting with the sensor. This solution could open a completely new scenario in the field of environmental gas sensing toward multipurpose nanodevices.