Single atom dispersed tungsten disulfide (WS2) based nanosensors for VOCs detection related to decomposed humans in disaster events

Locating and recovering the victims as a result of disaster events is extremely challenging due to vast search areas, hazardous nature of destroyed infrastructure, and large number of potential victims. An effective avenue for the victim’s detection is through the sensing of human-specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted both in life and in death. Motivated by this, we employed first principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations to study the sensing properties of pristine, vacancy-induced and single atom dispersed tungsten disulfide (WS₂) monolayers towards 11 specific VOCs associated with decomposing humans. We found that pristine, and vacancy-induced WS₂ weakly adsorbed the selected VOCs with adsorption energies (E_ads) between −0.26 to −0.76 eV. However, the incorporation of selected single atoms of Co, Fe, Nb, and Ni in WS₂ improved the sensing properties tremendously. In particular, Nb-WS₂ adsorbed the incident VOCs with E_ads values of −1.89, −209, −1.43, −0.94, −2.08, −1.57, −1.44, −1.47, −1.70, −1.03, and −2.14 eV for 2-Butanone, benzaldehyde, butanol, heptane, hexanal, methylamine, dimethyl disulfide, dimethyl trisulfide, pyridine, octane, and toluene, respectively, which are ideal for efficient sensing mechanism. Appropriate adsorptions were coupled with the measurable changes in the electronic properties (band gaps) of Nb-WS₂, which is essential for proficient sensing. Charge transfer analysis, electro localization functions, electrostatic potentials, and work function calculations further authenticated the sensing propensities of single atom dispersed WS₂. Finally, Langmuir adsorption model was employed to explore the sensing at diverse pressure and temperature settings. We believe that these results will help for the development of highly efficient nanosensors for the detection of VOCs related to decomposed humans in mass disaster events. This will increase the detection ability and the chance of locating these victims.