Abstract
In this talk I will discuss various uses of nanomaterials for sensing, from electrode materials, through labels to self-propelled autonomous sensing platforms.
I will first focus on 2D materials. The electrochemistry of graphene and its related materials is far more interesting and complex than anticipated, especially when one depicts graphene based on the IUPAC definition. This is because the real world graphene-based materials contain defects, adatoms, and various oxygen functional groups. The presence of oxygen functional groups and defects in graphene sheets strongly influence their heterogeneous electron transfer rates. In addition, graphene-based materials often contain either metallic or carbonaceous impurities which directly influence their electrocatalytic behaviors. These impurities originate either from the starting material (graphite) or from the production processes. I will show that many electrocatalytic properties assigned to graphene-based materials actually originated from the embedded metallic or carbonaceous impurities. Furthermore, I will discuss our recent research on the electrochemistry of layered transition metal dichalcogenides and black phosphorus. We will show several exapmples of electrochemical gas sensing, in mixture of gasses as CO2, water vapors, acetone, methanol and others. Then I will discuss the use of self-propelled microrobots for sensing.
Prof. Martin Pumera is a tenured Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore since 2010. He received his PhD at Charles University, Czech Republic, in 2001. After two postdoctoral stays (in the USA, Spain), he joined the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, in 2006 for a tenure-track arrangement and stayed there until Spring 2008 when he accepted a tenured position at NIMS. In 2009, Prof. Pumera received a ERC-StG award. Prof. Pumera has broad interests in nanomaterials and microsystems, in the specific areas of electrochemistry and synthetic chemistry of carbon nanomaterials, nanotoxicity, micro and nanomachines and 3D printing. He is Editor-in-Chief of Appl. Mater. Today (Elsevier), member of Editorial board of Chem. Eur. J., Electrochem. Commun., Electrophoresis, Electroanalysis, The Chemical Records, ChemElectroChem and eight other journals. He has published over 450 articles, which received over 16 000 citations (h-index of 63).
