Photocatalysis-driven gas and chemical sensors: From fundamental mechanisms to advanced materials and emerging applications

초록

Photocatalytic nanomaterials, owing to their high catalytic activity and efficient generation of reactive species, hold strong promise as active sensing elements for gas and chemical detection. Their intrinsic photoactivation capability enables redox reactions under light irradiation, offering distinct advantages in sensitivity, energy efficiency, and environmental compatibility. Building on these merits, photocatalysis-based sensors have emerged as a new class of detection technologies with great potential for real-world applications. Nevertheless, critical challenges-including poor selectivity, humidity interference, long-term degradation, and difficulties in integration-continue to restrict their industrial translation. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the field, beginning with the necessity of advanced sensors and the fundamentals of photocatalysis, followed by an in-depth discussion of sensing mechanisms and materials design strategies. Recent progress in elemental doping, heterostructure engineering, surface functionalization, and hybridization is highlighted, together with performance improvements achieved through these approaches. Applications across environmental monitoring, industrial safety, and biomedical diagnostics are examined. Finally, future opportunities are discussed, emphasizing flexible, visible-light-responsive, and self-powered sensor platforms integrated with artificial intelligence, which collectively define the path toward practical and scalable photocatalytic sensing technologies. © 2026 Elsevier B.V.

키워드