Visible-light-driven photocatalytic and chemical sensing properties of SnS₂ nanoflakes

This work demonstrated the successful and facile large-scale synthesis and characterizations of SnS₂ nanoflakes. The detailed morphological studies revealed that the synthesized products were nanoflakes and were grown in large quantity. The XRD pattern and detailed compositional studies confirmed that the synthesized SnS₂ nanoflakes were well-crystalline and possessing hexagonal SnS₂ phase. The synthesized SnS₂ nanoflakes were used as efficient photocatalysts for photocatalytic degradation and effective electron mediators for the fabrication of chemical sensor. The photocatalytic properties of SnS₂ nanoflakes towards the photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B dye under visible light irradiation showed reasonably good degradation of ∼61%. Moreover, the as-synthesized SnS₂ nanoflakes were used as efficient electron mediators for the fabrication of nitroaniline chemical sensor by simple I-V technique. Very high-sensitivity of ∼ 505.82±0.02 mAcm^-2.(mole/L) ^-1 and experimental detection limit of ∼15×10^-6 (mole/L) in a short response time of ∼10.0 s with LDR in the range of 15.6×10^-6-0.5×10^-3 mole L^-1 were observed for the fabricated nitroaniline chemical sensor. The observed results indicated that the SnS₂ nanoflakes can efficiently be used as visible-light-driven photocatalysts and the fabrication of ultra-high sensitive chemical sensors.