A low cost and flexible carbon nanotube pH sensor fabricated using aerosol jet technology for live cell applications

•A miniaturized CNT-based pH sensor with tunable sensitivity is developed.•Aerosol jet printing technique is optimized for the fabrication process of pH sensor.•The performance of the pH sensor depends significantly on the printing parameters.•The pH sensor is highly sensitive and repeatable with a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSensors and actuators. B, Chemical Vol. 260; pp. 227 - 235
Main Authors Goh, Guo Liang, Agarwala, Shweta, Tan, Yu Jun, Yeong, Wai Yee
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Lausanne Elsevier B.V 01.05.2018
Elsevier Science Ltd
Subjects
3D printing
Additive manufacturing
Aerosol jet
Aerosols
Biocompatibility
Carbon
Carbon nanotubes
Electrodes
Environmental monitoring
Jet printing
Low cost
Organic chemistry
Organisms
pH sensor
Printed electronics
Response time
Sensitivity analysis
Serpentine
Studies
Carbon nanotubes
Additive manufacturing
pH sensor
3D printing
Aerosol jet
Printed electronics
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Summary:•A miniaturized CNT-based pH sensor with tunable sensitivity is developed.•Aerosol jet printing technique is optimized for the fabrication process of pH sensor.•The performance of the pH sensor depends significantly on the printing parameters.•The pH sensor is highly sensitive and repeatable with a fair response time.•The pH sensor is low cost, highly flexible, and biocompatible. Minute pH changes impact all living organisms, and thus facile pH monitoring in environment and on the cellular level is important. A low cost and flexible carbon nanotube based pH sensor is fabricated in this work using Aerosol jet printing technique. The chemiresistive pH sensor is fabricated with a CNT-based miniaturized serpentine sensing element printed on top of the silver electrodes. The trace width of the serpentine sensing element is accurately controlled to about the same size as the gaps between the traces. Aerosol jet parameters are optimized to achieve high resolution printing of 20 μm. The fabricated pH sensor shows good sensitivity (up to 59 kΩ/pH) and repeatability (coefficient of variance <1.15%) with a response time of 20 s the sensor demonstrates excellent biocompatibility required for live cell applications.
ISSN:0925-4005
1873-3077
DOI:10.1016/j.snb.2017.12.127