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Porphyrins have been widely used for many years as functional materials for chemical sensors. Their outstanding chemical features are balanced by some restrictions in terms of transduction techniques. In particular, porphyrin layers are barely conductive, with the consequence that the fabrication of porphyrin based chemiresistors is not possible, except in few rare cases. On the other hand, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have superior electric properties ranging from metallic to semiconductor in character. Although the conductivity of CNTs is very sensitive to adsorbed molecules, it should be considered that the adsorption onto carbon structures is also scarcely selective and cannot be modified unless other molecular recognition systems are coupled with the CNTs. Following this approach, in this paper we investigated the sensing properties of hybrid CNT-porphyrin films to explore the possibility of transducing the adsorption events occurring in a porphyrin layer into resistance changes of the CNT layers. The results obtained indicate that the presence of the porphyrin films increases the sensitivity of the electric resistance of the CNTs to the concentration of volatile compounds. This enhancement is probably due to the catalytic effect of the metalloporphyrin in conveying the charge transfer from the adsorbate molecule to the CNTs substrate. This property of metalloporphyrins may introduce a further differentiation between porphyrin based sensors that could be positively utilized in sensor array configurations.

This work investigates the use of an unconventional reference material to determine experimentally the Cliff-Lorimer factor for EDS quantitative analysis with a transmission electron microscope. The results demonstrate the equivalence of a bi-layer of pure gold on pure silver with respect to a binary alloy foil of the same elements. RF-sputtering is a suitable technique to prepare such reference materials that have a uniform thickness within a few percent tolerance. The availability of a calibrated set of similar reference materials would allow direct measurement of the k-factors for a large number of elements. This would avoid the errors due to the use of theoretical k-factors extracted from the compilations available in the literature. A new expression of the correction factor for X-ray self-absorption of the sample has also been derived.

Analysis of binary gas mixtures using chemiresistors based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) networked films has been performed for chemical detection up to a sub-ppm level. The effects of individual interfering analytes of reducing H2S and NH3 gases on oxidizing NO2 gas adsorption in CNTs tangled films are considered. The CNTs are grown by plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition technology onto inexpensive alumina substrates, coated by cobalt nanosized catalyst. Charge transfer between adsorbed gas molecules and CNT networks, characterized by a semiconducting p-type electrical transport, occurs depending on opposite trend in the sensor response to the electron-donating interfering gases (H2S, NH3) and target electron-withdrawing NO2 gas causing a compensation of the charge transport, upon given working conditions. This compensated exchange of electrical charge affects the limit of detection of the targeted NO2 gas sensed in different real-world binary gas mixtures of reducing interferers of H2S and NH3. In addition, the functionalization of the CNT films with Au nanoclusters enhanced the sensitivity of the chemiresistor and tuned the compensation of electrical charge crossover in the selected binary oxido-reducing mixtures.