Low working temperature operation of Layered Double Hydroxides sensors for air quality monitoring in smart cities

Air quality monitoring in big cities is a task that needs to become easy and economically convenient, in order to favor the collection and the management of data of the most polluted city areas with the intent of changing traffic paths or regulating city accesses. At this purpose, different types of sensors can be deployed to form a smart sensing network. Despite innovative materials and related integrating technologies, sensing devices for air quality still consume considerable amount of energy to perform real time operation and cleaning calibration procedure. In this work, we propose the implementation of Layered Double Hydroxides to be used as sensing material at low working temperature. The resulting devices exploit the porous of the nanostructure and the humidity present in the air to activate the adsorption procedure. In particular, Chlorine intercalated Layered Double Hydroxides reveal an interesting behavior in detecting several gases and air pollutants such as CO, NO and CH4 at room temperature. An extensive investigation with different concentrations has been carried out.