Design and Development of Fuel Cell Type Gas Sensor with Atomic Au decorated PANI/Pt Composite

In recent years, polyaniline has been of considerable interest and many gas sensors for detecting ppm level concentration of NH3, NO2, etc. have been fabricated. However, those sensors suffered from limitations of slow response time and selectivity problems. Gold deposited on polyaniline offers a solution to the slow response time by acting as a catalyst. By electrochemical techniques, it is possible to deposit an atomic-size gold onto polyaniline, thereby changing the electrocatalytic behavior of the polymer. In this paper, polyaniline/platinum electrode decorated with atomic gold for the application to gas sensors was studied. Discriminable patterns were observed from the cyclic voltammograms of such a modified electrode in n-propanol and i-propanol before and after atomic-size gold deposition.