Abstract
The need for new clean energy sources for portable devices in biomedical, agro-food industry and environmental related sectors boosts scientists towards the development of new strategies for energy harvesting for their application in biodevices development. In this sense, enzymatic biofuel cells (BFCs) have gained much attention in the last years. This work faces the challenge of develop new generation of BFCs able to be adapted to remote and personal monitoring devices within the framework of wearable technologies. To this aim, one of the main challenges consists of the development of conductive and biocompatible electrodes, which constitute a challenge itself due to the non-conductive capabilities of most of the biocompatible supports. Additionally, bioelectrodes may achieve good mechanical properties and resilience in order to be suitable for the envisioned application, which involves exposure to deformation during long-term use. Furthermore, it is desirable that the systems developed are versatile enough to be adapted to miniaturized supports for new personal wearable devices development. In the present work, self-standing chitosan-carbon black membranes have been synthesized and modified with suitable enzymes for the assembly of an enzymatic glucose BFC. The membranes have been adapted to be integrated in miniaturized interdigitated gold electrodes as the step forward to miniaturized systems, modified with enzymes and metallic particles clusters and tested for energy harvesting from glucose solutions. The miniaturized system produces a power density of 0.64 µW/cm2 that is enhanced to 2.75 µW/cm2 in the presence of the metallic clusters, which constitute a 76% incensement. Such preliminary demonstrations highlight the good response of metals in bioelectrode configuration. However, energy harvesting real application of the developed miniaturized electrodes need still improvements but pave the way for the use of BFC as an energy source in wearable technologies due to their good mechanical, electrical and biocompatible properties.
Highlights
Chitosan is a natural biopolymer obtained from the deacetylation of chitin, which can be found, for example, in shrimp shells
When dealing with enzymatic glucose biofuel cells (BFC) for energy harvesting aimed to be wearable or implantable, new strategies must be implemented since long-term use is required
Glucose BFCs consist of biodevices aimed to harvest energy from human body due to the catalytic electrochemical oxidation of glucose as a result of the selective recognition of a substrate by the enzyme, typically glucose oxidase (GOx) or glucose dehydrogenase (GDH)
Summary
Chitosan is a natural biopolymer obtained from the deacetylation of chitin, which can be found, for example, in shrimp shells. It is usual to dope chitosan with carbon-based materials such as carbon nanotubes, graphene or carbon black to overcome the insulating barrier [4][5][6] In this sense, the former approach of casting onto the surface of electrodic materials is useful when dealing with bioelectrodes to be used in biosensor development with analytical purpose or electrochemical characterization of enzymes and their bioelectrocatalytic activity. Two pulses are applied to the cell in which the first one (in the order of ms) is responsible of the generation of nuclei of the particles, the second pulse (in the order of s) allow the growth of those particles [11] This is a highly valuable synthesis feature since metals included in BFCs configuration have been proved to enhance the power input by improving the electron transfer rate [12]. Integration of metallic clusters on the membrane surface have been tested to evaluate the feasibility of the membranes to be in situ modified and the possible enhancement in the response of the BFCs as prove of the concept of this approach
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