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Nanomaterial and Agricultural Laboratory (NAL)

                  In our group, we focus on:

Nanomaterials for gas sensors: Nowdays, gas sensors are widely used for detection of toxic and flammable gases. However, the traditional gas sensors need to heat the sensor materials to a temperature higher than 300 oC, such as SnO2 and ZnO based materials. Nanowire has shown a great potential for the compact and low power consumption gas sensors. The interest for the nanowire gas sensors include the fabrication and sensitivity study of nanowires, such as Fe2O3, ZnO, SnO2, LaFeO3 etc; the effect of doping noble metals such as Pd, Pt, and Au on the sensitivity, the fabrication of gas sensor device and multiple gas sensor arrays for the practical applications.Moreover, metal doped ZnO and graphene oxide also can use as gas sensor to detect the NH3, ethanol, acetelyene gas.

Diluted magnetic semiconductors : Spintronic devices has attracted great interest for its manipulation both spin and charges. Diluted magnetic semiconductor (DMS) will play a very important role in tomorrow’s spintronic devices. ZnO has been identified as a very promising candidate for room temperature diluted magnetic semiconductor. However, the doping mechanisms are still under debate, such as whether it is intrinsic or cluster/phase segregation, whether it is carrier mediated, How to improve the doping moment and how to prepared high quality n and p-type DMS (especially p type) etc. Hence, in the future research, efforts will be made to explore these problems.

Activated Carbon from agricultural wastes: Activated carbon (AC) is an adsorbent with high surface area and high porosity due to the activation process resulting in its porous structures. It is applied in many applications such as the filter for absorbing toxic fumes and toxic gas, portable water filter and the adsorption of heavy metal.