Multi-functional Carbon Nanofibers for Bio- and Chemosensing Strategies

Wednesday, March 10, 2021: 2:40 PM - 3:15 PM

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Description

We have recently shown that carbon nanofibers (CNFs) as transducers are superior in comparison to screen-printed electrodes used in most electrochemical low-resource setting biosensors. Since ease and reproducibility of fabrication of such transducers is of utmost importance in the point-of-care and in-field sensor fields, we have investigated strategies to generate CNFs using laser-induced pyrolysis. Here, polyimide nanofibers are electrospun onto surfaces and subsequently transformed to CNFs using a CO2 laser in a simple scribing process under ambient conditions. The resulting 3D mats of CNFs can be transferred to any other surface or be used as free-standing transducer and are therefore very easy to make, to miniaturize, to integrate into sensing platforms. In addition, this process also enables straight-forward large-scale production. We will present our most recent work on the in-situ functionalization of such CNFs with nanocatalysts. Specifically, a solution of Ni(acac)2/Polyimide is electrospun and subsequently a desired design is printed via the CO2 laser. This creates uniformly distributed small Ni nanoparticles (~ 8nm) very tightly adhering to the CNF network. Interestingly, morphological and performance characteristics can be directly influenced by metal content and lasing power and hence can be adapted towards desired performance. Most importantly, this strategy can be adapted to a whole range of metal precursors and hence provide opportunities for such 3D CNFs nanocatalyst hybrids in food and environmental applications where high performance but also sustainable and low-cost fabrication are of utmost importance.

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Additional Info

Keywords: Please select up to 4 keywords ONLY:
Environmental - Water,Food Safety,Agriculture,Nanoscience