Design and development of amperometric gas sensor with atomic Au–Polyaniline/Pt composite

Rapid advancements in information processing and embedded systems require high selective and fast sensors. Conventional gas sensors are not suitable for the detection of isomers of organic compounds due to cross-sensitivity and the response time being limited by slow chemical kinetics. Amperometric gas sensors using conducting polymers modified with metal catalysts are a suitable and robust system due to many tunable properties. In this paper, conducting polymer polyaniline was electrochemically decorated with clusters containing precisely defined number of gold atoms to function as an electro-catalyst. The modified polymer composite showed fast reaction rate for the electro-oxidation of alcohols in both liquid and gas phases. The number of gold atoms affected the catalytic activity. Cyclic voltammograms were measured and results showed discriminable patterns between n-propanol and iso-propanol even at different gas concentrations. Thus, it was demonstrated that gas sensor arrays can be realized by decorating different number of gold atoms on polyaniline electrodes, to yield defined and different selectivity.