Recent advances in energy-saving chemiresistive gas sensors: A review

With the tremendous advances in technology, gas-sensing devices are being popularly used in many distinct areas, including indoor environments, industries, aviation, and detectors for various toxic domestic gases and vapors. Even though the most popular type of gas sensor, namely, resistive-based gas sensors, have many advantages over other types of gas sensors, their high working temperatures lead to high energy consumption, thereby limiting their practical applications, especially in mobile and portable devices. As possible ways to deal with the high-power consumption of resistance-based sensors, different strategies such as self-heating, MEMS technology, and room-temperature operation using especial morphologies, have been introduced in recent years. In this review, we discuss different types of energy-saving chemisresitive gas sensors including self-heated gas sensors, MEMS based gas sensors, room temperature operated flexible/wearable sensor and their application in the fields of environmental monitoring. At the end, the review will be concluded by providing a summary, challenges, recent trends, and future perspectives. [Display omitted] The current trends in resistive-based gas sensors based on their energy consumption point of view. •Recent advances and trends in energy-saving chemiresistive gas sensors are discussed.•Self-heating gas sensors are known as promising gas sensors, which do not require external-heaters.•Micro-electromechanical system (MEMS)-based gas sensors are compact, rely on micro-heaters, which show power consumption in few tens of mW range.•Room temperature and flexible gas sensors can be employed as battery operated portable sensing devices.•A brief summary with current challenges and future perspectives are discussed on the possible opportunities for further developing energy-saving gas sensors.