Non-enzymatic glucose sensor based on ZnO–CeO2 whiskers

Abstract

Highly sensitive and accurate test of blood glucose level is important to protect people against diabetes. Herein, we develop a novel non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose detector by employing long whiskers as electrocatalyst for glucose oxidization. The detector consists of cerium oxide nano-whiskers decorated with zinc oxide nanoparticles. The ZnO–CeO2 nanocomposites are prepared through a hydrothermal synthesis process, in which the ultrathin petal carbon is introduced as template. The as-prepared material has a huge surface area, nontoxicity, and high electrocatalytic activity. The electrochemical analysis of ZnO–CeO2 glucose sensor is carried out by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) with a potential window of 0–1 V in phosphate buffer solution (pH = 7.2). The nanocomposite shows a remarkable performance for detecting glucose with a linear range of 0.5–300 μM, and a limit of detection (LOD) of 0.224 μM (40 ppb). The differential pulse voltammetry results show an excellent linear relationship between current signal intensity and glucose concentration (R2 = 0.99944). These results indicate that such non-enzymatic sensor based on nanocomposites could be an ideal method for detection of glucose.