Using Galistan to fabricate porous gold electrodes: toward non-enzymatic glucose fuel cells with enhanced performance for driving wearable/bioelectronic devices

D Desmaële,M De Vittorio,A Qualtieri,F La Malfa,M Di Lorenzo,F Rizzi

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1407/1/012068

Abstract

This paper presents a new facile route for the fabrication of enzyme-free porous gold electrodes (PGEs) which can directly convert the chemical energy of glucose into electricity. The method is low-cost and does not require any special equipment: porous gold is simply grown on carbon paper containing liquid metal particles. As a first proof-of-concept, we report on the fabrication of circular PGEs having a diameter of 12.5 mm. When immersed in a 10 mM glucose solution, such PGEs can produce up to 25 µW (maximum power density 10 µW·cm−2 at 45 µA·cm−2). Because the process presented is versatile and scalable, we envision PGEs with long-term stability that could be stacked to meet the power budget of various wearable/bioelectronic devices.

Highlights

porous gold electrodes (PGEs) appear attractive for supplying power to biosensors and biodevices requiring long periods of operation
First, the Galistan particles (GPs) injected into the TCP-Ds were visually inspected with the SEM
As can be viewed from figure 2A, the GPs penetrate relatively well into the fibrous electrode structure

Summary

Introduction

PGEs appear attractive for supplying power to biosensors and biodevices requiring long periods of operation (e.g., cardiac pacemakers). Because PGEs can directly convert the chemical energy of glucose into electricity without using enzymes [1], they might bring solutions to the well recognized limited stability of conventional enzyme-based electrodes. Despite this promise, a major hindrance to the practical deployment of PGEs might be related to their fabrication. Most works that discussed the HAET, reported PGEs with rather small geometrical dimensions [1, 3]. As an alternative to the HAET, we here introduce a novel fabrication process to straightforwardly produce PGEs of various dimensions. Compared to the HAET, our novel fabrication process offers distinctive features: i) no specific equipment (e.g., potentiostat) is required; ii) the amount of gold used can be an order of magnitude lower

Methods

Results

Conclusion