Surface Kinetics Studies on Chemoresistive Gas Sensors: an Advanced System for Operando DRIFT Spectroscopy

Research on gas sensors typically analyses its transduction function. There exist a wide literature on adsorption of chemical species at surface, especially in heterogeneous catalysis. However, some limitations of chemoresistive gas sensors, such as partial selectivity to a gaseous analyte and long-term instability, cannot be explained (and possibly compensated for) by mere electric characterization. Thus, it becomes fundamental to deeply investigate the chemical phenomena occurring at the sensing film surface, while analysing the connected variations of the electronic structure and sensing characteristics, i.e., resorting to an operando system.