Plasma-induced chemical etching generating Ni3S2 for formaldehyde detection

Abstract

In this paper, Ni3S2 nanosheet (NS) was generated by chemical etching with sodium sulfide directly on the nickel foam (NF), which was induced by dielectric barrier discharge plasma in liquid. Compared with other chemical etching methods of nickel-based nanomaterials, this method was not only rapid (40 min) and mild (at room temperature and atmospheric pressure), but also showed consistent stability and good reproducibility. The Ni3S2 NS/NF electrode showed excellent performance in the electrochemical detection of formaldehyde under alkaline conditions. It had a good linear relationship with the concentration of formaldehyde in the range of 0.002-5.45 mmol/L (R2 = 0.9957) and the limit of detection (LOD) was 1.23 µmol/L (S/N = 3). The sensitivity was 1286.9 µA L mmol‒1 cm‒2, and the response time was about 5 s. The plasma-induced chemical etching strategy provides a simple and stable electrode preparation method, which has great application prospects in nonenzymatic electrochemical sensors.