Ambient self-derivation of nickel-cobalt hydroxysulfide multistage nanoarray for high-performance electrochemical glucose sensing

Abstract Transition-metal sulphides have drawn intense attention in the fabrication of electrochemical glucose sensors. Nevertheless, in their typical synthetic process, the nocuous organic reagents and high-temperature treatment are always required. In this work, we synthesized a nickel-cobalt carbonate hydroxysulfide multistage nanowire array (NiCo-CHS NW) on carbon cloth (CC) through room-temperature sulfuration of nickel-cobalt carbonate hydroxide. The formed leaves-on-branchlet structure provides more active sites and higher areal specific capacitance, while the introduction of sulfur improves the electron-transfer kinetics. Beneficial from both the structural and compositional advantages, the NiCo-CHS NW/CC electrode exhibits a wide linear range of 0.25–3308 μM, a low determination limit of 0.25 μM, and a high sensitivity of 2209 μA mM−1 cm−2. In addition, it also shows high selectivity, good stability and reproducibility, and high feasibility of sensing glucose in human blood serum.