Growth and properties of Ag-doped ZnO nanoflowers for highly sensitive phenyl hydrazine chemical sensor application

We report here the fabrication of a robust, highly sensitive, reliable and reproducible phenyl hydrazine chemical sensor using Ag-doped ZnO nanoflowers as efficient electron mediators. The Ag-doped ZnO nanoflowers were synthesized by facile hydrothermal process at low-temperature and characterized in detail in terms of their morphological, structural, compositional and optical properties. The detailed morphological and structural characterizations revealed that the synthesized nanostructures were flower-shaped, grown in very high-density, and possessed well-crystalline structure. The chemical composition confirmed the presence of Ag into the lattices of Ag-doped ZnO nanoflowers. High sensitivity of similar to 557.108 +/- 0.012 mA cm(-2) (mol L-1)(-1) and detection limit of similar to 5 x 10(-9) mol L-1 with correlation coefficient (R) of 0.97712 and short response time (10.0 s) were observed for the fabricated chemical sensor towards the detection of phenyl hydrazine by using a simple current-voltage (I-V) technique. Due to high sensitivity and low-detection limit, it can be concluded that Ag-doped ZnO nanoflowers could be an effective candidate for the fabrication of phenyl hydrazine chemical sensors. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.