The behaviour of gas sensitive materials in the atmosphere with oxygen shortage

Chemical resistive gas sensors work in the gas atmosphere both reductive and oxidisable with different composition. For the performance of these components, a very important thing is their chemical resistivity to changes in particle pressure of oxygen in the surrounding atmosphere. The paper presents research studies on behavior of gas sensitive materials based on tin dioxide. The studies were conducted in the atmosphere of aliphatic alcohol. The conducted x-ray studies and those ones with the use of scanning microscope showed that these materials were easily reduced to metallic zinc. The studies were conducted in temperatures considerably lower than temperature of volume reduction of SnO₂ suggested in literature. Reduced gas sensitive materials were put to the process of regeneration in higher temperatures in the atmosphere of synthetic air. In the process of regeneration, materials regained their initial physicochemical parameters.