Abstract
Graphite pencil stroked electrodes for paper-based Microfluidic devices are gaining immense attention due to their electrochemical properties, cost efficiency, and ease-of-use. However, their widespread use has been hindered by the challenges associated with their manual fabrication such as non-uniformity in graphite deposition, applied pressure, etc. This work presents the design and development of an automated graphite pencil stroking device for graphite electrode fabrication with high efficiency through a compact, inexpensive and automatic process, with reduced fabrication time and human intervention leading to more uniformity. The motion platform of Graphtec plotter was used to create multiple strokes with the help of the proposed device. Such inexpensive graphite electrodes (less than the US $1) have been observed to be porous in nature, acting as diffusion agents. The automated graphite electrodes were used to study the performance of microfluidic paper fuel cells (MPFCs) with formic acid, oxygen, and sulphuric acid acting as fuel, oxidising agent and electrolyte respectively. From this configuration, the maximum current density and power density were measured to be 1,305.5 µA cm−2 and 135.5 µW cm−2, respectively at 0.3 V stable OCP at 100 strokes. Overall, the study enumerates the development of an automated pencil stroke device for fabricating graphite electrodes, which can potentially be harnessed in numerous miniaturized paper based applications.
Highlights
Graphite pencil stroked electrodes for paper-based Microfluidic devices are gaining immense attention due to their electrochemical properties, cost efficiency, and ease-of-use
Paper–pencil based microfluidic fuel cell is one of the most recent vital advancements to develop point of the source (POS) and point of care (POC) devices owing to the well-proven benefits of microfluidic environment and graphite e lectrodes[4,5]
Graphite pencils are being used as electrodes and have shown encouraging outcomes and promising features of microfluidic paper fuel cells (MPFCs) when compared with the existing approaches
Summary
Graphite pencil stroked electrodes for paper-based Microfluidic devices are gaining immense attention due to their electrochemical properties, cost efficiency, and ease-of-use. In the earlier work by the authors, Rao et al investigated pencil paper based fuel cells with formic acid acting as fuel, oxygen as an oxidant, graphite electrodes as electrodes Such graphite electrodes were realized by manual strokes with varying numbers of strokes and with diverse grades of p encils[17,18]. The quantity of graphite deposited on the paper affects the performance of the fuel cell, which can be modified by varying the number of pencil s trokes[18] This manual process for electrode fabrication brings in scope for many precisions related variations and errors due to human intervention, as the designer does not have any precise control over the amount of graphite deposited. It can be concluded that there is a need for a simple, user-friendly, and reliable platform device for graphite electrodes formation in an automated manner
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