Application of polypyrrole nanobelts as electrode material for the detection of aliphatic alcohols

The effective working electrode based on polypyrrole (PPy) nanobelts is employed for the fabrication of highly sensitive and reproducible aliphatic alcohols chemical sensor. The unique PPy nanobelts are simply synthesized by in situ chemical polymerization of pyrrole monomer in the presence of ferric chloride as oxidant and methylene blue as reactive self-degraded template. The morphological and elemental mapping properties reveal that the synthesized PPy nanobelts possess the uniform dimension with a high aspect of chemical compositions. PPy nanobelts based electrode toward the detection of aliphatic alcohols are elucidated by measuring the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements to define the electrochemical and electrocatalytic behavior of PPy nanobelts. Furthermore, the current (I)- voltage (V) characteristics are performed to evaluate the sensing performance of PPy nanobelts electrode toward the detection of aliphatic alcohols. Among different aliphatic alcohols, the methanol chemical sensor based on PPy nanobelts electrode displays the highest sensitivity of ~205.64 µA.mM^-1cm^-2, good detection limit of~6.92 µM with correlation coefficient (R) of ~0.98271 and short response time (10 s).