Nitrogen-Rich Polyacrylonitrile-Based Graphitic Carbons for Hydrogen Peroxide Sensing

Brandon Pollack; Sunshine Holmberg; Derosh George; Ich Tran; Marc Madou; Maziar Ghazinejad

doi:10.3390/s17102407

Nitrogen-Rich Polyacrylonitrile-Based Graphitic Carbons for Hydrogen Peroxide Sensing

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Oct 21;17(10):2407. doi: 10.3390/s17102407.

Authors

Brandon Pollack¹, Sunshine Holmberg², Derosh George³, Ich Tran⁴, Marc Madou⁵, Maziar Ghazinejad^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. pollackb@uci.edu.
² Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. sholmber@uci.edu.
³ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. deroshg@uci.edu.
⁴ Irvine Materials Research Institute (IMRI), University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. ictran@uci.edu.
⁵ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. mmadou@uci.edu.
⁶ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. mghazinejad@csufresno.edu.
⁷ Department of Mechanical Engineering, California State University, Fresno, CA 93740, USA. mghazinejad@csufresno.edu.

Abstract

Catalytic substrate, which is devoid of expensive noble metals and enzymes for hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂), reduction reactions can be obtained via nitrogen doping of graphite. Here, we report a facile fabrication method for obtaining such nitrogen doped graphitized carbon using polyacrylonitrile (PAN) mats and its use in H₂O₂ sensing. A high degree of graphitization was obtained with a mechanical treatment of the PAN fibers embedded with carbon nanotubes (CNT) prior to the pyrolysis step. The electrochemical testing showed a limit of detection (LOD) 0.609 µM and sensitivity of 2.54 µA cm^-2 mM^-1. The promising sensing performance of the developed carbon electrodes can be attributed to the presence of high content of pyridinic and graphitic nitrogens in the pyrolytic carbons, as confirmed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The reported results suggest that, despite their simple fabrication, the hydrogen peroxide sensors developed from pyrolytic carbon nanofibers are comparable with their sophisticated nitrogen-doped graphene counterparts.

Keywords: electrospinning; graphitic nitrogen; graphitization; hydrogen peroxide sensing; polyacrylonitrile; pyridinic nitrogen.