The development of high-performance acetone gas sensor is of great significance for environmental protection and personal safety. SnO₂ has been intensively applied in chemical sensing areas, because of its low cost, high mobility of electrons, and good chemical stability. Herein, we incorporated nitrogen atoms into the SnO₂ nanostructure by simple solvothermal and subsequent calcination to improve gas sensing property for acetone. The crystallization, morphology, element composition, and microstructure of as-prepared products were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), Raman spectroscopy, UV–visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (UV–vis DRS), and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method. It has been found that N-incorporating resulted in decreased crystallite size, reduced band-gap width, increased surface oxygen vacancies, enlarged surface area, and narrowed pore size distribution. When evaluated as gas sensor, nitrogen-incorporated SnO₂ nanostructure exhibited excellent sensitivity for acetone gas at the optimal operating temperature of 300 °C with high sensor response (R_air/R_gas − 1 = 357) and low limit of detection (7 ppb). The nitrogen-incorporated SnO₂ gas sensor shows a good selectivity to acetone in the interfering gases of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, hydrogen, and methane. Furthermore, the possible gas-sensing mechanism of N-incorporated SnO₂ toward acetone has been carefully discussed.

Polymer-ceramic dielectric composites have been of great interest because they combine the processability of polymers with the desired dielectric properties of the ceramics. We fabricated a low voltage-operated flexible organic field-effect transistor (OFET) based on crosslinked poly (4-vinyl phenol) (PVP) polymer blended with novel ceramic calcium titanate nanoparticles (CaTiO₃ NPs) as gate dielectric. To reduce interface roughness caused by nanoparticles, it was further coated with a very thin PVP film. The resulting OFET exhibited much lower operated voltage (reducing from –10.5 V to –2.9 V), a relatively steeper threshold slope (~0.8 V/dec) than those containing a pure PVP dielectric. This is ascribed to the high capacitance of the CaTiO₃ NP-filled PVP insulator, and its smoother and hydrophobic dielectric surface proved by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and a water contact angle test. We also evaluated the transistor properties in a compressed state. The corresponding device had no significant degradation in performance when bending at various diameters. In particular, it operated well continuously for 120 hours during a constant bending stress. We believe that this technology will be instrumental in the development of future flexible and printed electronic applications.

In this paper, we prepared mesoporous nickel cobaltite (NiCo₂O₄) nanostructures with multi-morphologies by simple solvothermal and subsequent heat treatment. By adjusting the solvent type, mesoporous NiCo₂O₄ nanoparticles, nanorods, nanowires, and microspheres were easily prepared. The as-prepared products were systematically characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method. Furthermore, the catalytic activities towards the thermal decomposition of ammonium perchlorate (AP) of as-prepared NiCo₂O₄ nanostructures were investigated.

We present here the syntheses, crystal structure, and characterizations of a new mixed metal phosphatoantimonate, with the name of Li ₅ CuSb(PO ₄ ) ₄ (LCSP), which was synthesized by traditional solid-state method for the first time. According to the single-crystal structure analysis, the title compound crystallizes in the triclinic system with space group P 1 ‾ $P\overline{1}$ , which features a novel 2D frameworks formed by the corner sharing PO ₄ groups, SbO ₆ octahedra, and CuO ₄ pseudo plane tetrahedra. The anionic [CuSb(PO ₄ ) ₄ ] ⁵⁻ cupro-stibio-phosphate layer is composed of two alternate chains of [Cu(PO ₄ ) ₂ ] ⁴⁻ and [Sb(PO ₄ ) ₂ ] ⁻ further connected via the linkages of P–O–Sb. Characterizations including thermal and optical analyses have also been performed. The most impressive thing about the title compound is its layer structure and high Li content in its formula. AC impedance measurements have been carried out to study its conductivity. The representative impedance spectra of 250 °C, 300 °C and 350 °C indicated well-separated bulk arch and grain boundary arc in frequency domain. Linear fitting of arrhenius plot of bulk and GB conductivity showed that bulk activation energy was 1.00 ± 0.02 eV while GB activation energy was 1.30 ± 0.04 eV.