Polyaniline nanoflowers grafted onto nanodiamonds via a soft template-guided secondary nucleation process for high-performance glucose sensing

Abstract

Superfine polyaniline (PANI) nanoflowers (NF) with protruded whiskers at the edge of the flowers were produced on the surface of nanodiamonds (NDs) using cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as a soft template and fine tuning the graft co-polymerization conditions. Typically, the amount of amino-functionalized ND (ND-NH₂) and the soft template CTAB used in the graft polymerization plays an important role in directing the NF morphology. The correlation between the amount of ND-NH₂ and morphology has been discussed in terms of secondary nucleation for PANI growth. More importantly, the ND-grafted PANI (ND_x-g-PANI) NF exhibits a superior performance for glucose detection and possesses wider linear concentration range (1–30 mM), low detection limit (0.018 mM), and high sensitivity (2.03 μA mM⁻¹) as compared to most of the enzyme glucose sensors fabricated with either PANI or carbon nanostructures. The results obtained from this study offer scope for future studies on the fabrication of new biosensors with other aniline derivatives and carbon nanostructures.