Fabrication of a single CuO nanowire-based gas sensor working at room temperature

CuO is an important p-type metal oxide semiconductor material and it has been used in many fields for its excellent physical and chemical properties, such as field effect transistors, photovoltaic cells, field emission nanodevices, and chemical and gas sensors. In this paper, CuO nanowires are synthesized by thermal oxidation of copper foil and suitable DEP parameters are chosen to assemble a single CuO nanowire on microelectrodes to fabricate a single CuO nanowire-based device. Experiments in this paper show that the single CuO nanowire-based device can work as field effect transistor and gas sensor. The single CuO nanowire device has a significant respond to the atmosphere with alcohol at room temperature, so it has potential to work as an alcohol gas sensor at room temperature. The single CuO nanowire device also has quick and significant respond to the humidity at room temperature and a novel liner relationship between conductivity and the relative humidity from 30% to 100%.