Ricerc@Sapienza

Recently, the world health organization (WHO) was estimated that the diabetic patients among total population are 463 million (9.3%), worldwide in the year 2019, and it is expected to rise 700 million (10.9%) by 2030. For this motive, the research on glucose sensors are attaining tremendous interest for clinical diagnosis of diabetes, pharmaceutical analysis, personal care, and food monitoring. To this purpose, carbon-based nanostructures are emerging materials such as carbon nanotubes (CNT), single/multiwalled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT/MWCNT), and graphene. Among them, Graphene has attracted in attention due to their outstanding mechanical and electrical properties useful for many engineering and medical applications. Basically, Graphene is a 2D sheet consists of carbon atoms in hexagonal lattice structure, and few stacks of these sheets named as Graphene Nano Platelets (GNPs). Moreover, the GNP based nanocomposites electrical properties are modified based up on the choice of polymer matrix. In this proposed project, the traditional conductive polymer polyaniline (PANI) is chosen owing to their intrinsic electrical properties, easy processability, and an excellent thermal stability. In addition, metallic nickel nano particles are gaining much interest due to its low cost and electrocatalytic properties. Therefore, this project main aim is to produce PANI/graphene/nickel based composite film by a two-step procedure for achieving synergetic effect of both an excellent conductive and electro catalytic properties for highly sensitive non-enzymatic glucose sensing applications. Furthermore, the fabricated film will be characterized by electrochemical measurements, such as cyclic voltammetry, and amperometry, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS), X-ray diffractometry (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), wettability (WCA), and atomic force microscopy (AFM) available at Sapienza (CNIS) laboratory.