Facile and Flexible Glucose Sensors Based on Copper Thin Films

The electrochemical enzymatic electrodes dominate the world market for blood glucose monitoring devices for controlling, as well as reducing the detrimental effects of diabetes. However, the enzymatic electrodes exhibit constraints restricting their reliance on the enzyme’s activity which can be influenced by the external, and the environmental factors such as temperature, pH, and humidity etc. However, the greater thickness of the enzyme layer hinders the performance of the glucose biosensors resulting in signal dampening or loss. In addition, the selectivity of the electrodes is affected by the interferents present in blood. Moreover, the invasive nature of the electrodes is a major problem considering the patient’s perspective. In contrast, recent research activities demonstrated that the electrochemical non-enzymatic electrodes possess huge potential for inexpensive and highly sensitive glucose monitoring devices, yet these electrodes are invasive in nature. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to fabricate electrochemical non-enzymatic non-invasive electrodes for sweat glucose monitoring devices. A very simple low-cost fabrication technique has been shown to make the facile, flexible, and inexpensive electrodes to detect sugar in sweat bio-analyte for a non-invasive glucose monitoring system using the native stable Cu oxides (CuNOx), Cu2O, layers grown on 35 µm thin Cu foils keeping under ambient conditions (25℃- and 760-mm Hg) for more than 2 years so that the oxide layers are full-grown, and fully stable. Moreover, the foils also annealed at various temperatures such as 160, 230, and 280℃ with new temperature profile for reducing the required time of growing stable oxides and producing oxides with larger crystallized structures with higher surface – to – volume ratio. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) results supported that at 280℃ annealing temperature the surface, mostly, transformed into highly electrocatalytic CuO with larger grain sizes, crystallized structures, and the uniform layer of ~ 140 nm. The electrochemical characterization, and sensing performance of the electrodes have been done by cyclic voltammetry (CV), one of the excellent and well accepted electrochemical methods, with the 3 – electrode configuration of the potentiostat. The CuNOx sensors of having ~10 nm layer of stable Cu2O exhibited a sensitivity of 603.42 μA mM−1 cm−2, a linear range beyond the desired limit of 7.00 mM with excellent linearity (R2 = 0.9983) and a low limit of detection of 94.21 μM. In contrast, the new annealing profile has. the CuNOx sensors annealed at 280 ºC using new temperature profile provided twin calibration curves of linear ranges of 0.05 – 1.00 mM and 1.00 – 7.00 mM, that applicable for sweat and blood glucose sensing, respectively, and exhibited a sensitivity of 1795 μA mM−1 cm−2, a linear range up to the desired limit of 1.00 mM for sweat glucose sensing with excellent linearity (R2 = 0.9844), and a lower limit of detection of 135.39 μM. In addition, it has been shown that the peak electro-oxidation current of glucose sensing is linearly related with the squire root of the annealing temperature, √T. This can help to figure out the required applied annealing temperature for getting desired peak electro-oxidation current of glucose in a human health monitoring system.

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