Many
commercially available pH sensors are fabricated with a glass
membrane as the sensing component because of several advantages of
glass-based electrodes such as versatility, high accuracy, and excellent
stability in various conditions. However, because of their bulkiness
and poor mechanical properties, conventional glass-based sensors are
not ideal for wearable or flexible applications. Here, we report for
the first time the fabrication of a flexible glass-based pH sensor
suitable for biomedical and environmental applications where flexibility
and stability of the sensor are critical for long-term and real-time
monitoring. The sensor was fabricated via a simple and facile approach
using the cold atmospheric plasma technique in which a pH sensitive
silica coating was deposited from a siloxane precursor onto a carbon
electrode. In order to increase the sensitivity and stability of the
sensor, we employed a postprocessing step which involves annealing
of the silica coated electrode at elevated temperatures. This process
was optimized to ensure that the crucial properties such as porosity
and hydration functionality were balanced to obtain the best and most
reliable sensitivity of the sensor. Our sensitivity test results indicated
that these sensors exhibit excellent and stable sensitivity with a
slope of about 48 mV/pH (r
2 = 0.998) and
selectivity across a pH range of 4 to 10 in the presence of various
cations. The optimized sensor has shown stable sensitivity for a long
period of time (30 h of immersion) and in different bending conditions.
We demonstrate in this investigation that this flexible cost-effective
pH sensor can withstand the sterilization process resulting from ultraviolet
radiation and shows repeatable sensitivity with less than ±5
mV potential drift from the sensitivity values of the standard optimized
sensor.
Gamma radiation sterilization approach has been widely used for pharmaceutical packaging worldwide. Therefore, the development of an advanced dosimeter for monitoring the gamma radiation dosage during the sterilization process is...
Here we report a simple approach to increase the stability performance of all-solid-state electrochemical sensors by improving the interfacial bonding between the ion selective membrane and electrode through cold atmospheric plasma surface treatment.
The development of flexible hybrid electronics (FHEs) with high‐throughput integration of electrical components onto digitally printed circuits has a wide range of applications, such as asset tracking, wearable electronics, and structural health monitoring. However, one of the major challenges with FHEs is the process of soldering the electrical components onto a printed circuit while having minimal thermal damage to the printed traces and their temperature‐sensitive polymeric substrates. Here, the possibility of utilizing near‐infrared (NIR) technology as a nondestructive photonic approach for rapid soldering and mounting electrical components onto printed circuits while keeping the polymer substrate at a relatively low temperature during the soldering process is investigated. Results of this systematic study show that FHEs prepared with the optimized NIR processing conditions produce the desired reflow of solder with effective electrical connection and metallic bonding of electrical components onto the conductive traces with excellent mechanical stability (no failure even after 1000 cycles of bending). Furthermore, using this technique and as a proof of concept, the fabrication of a wearable FHE device that provides a remote assessment of the wound exudate absorption in dressings and notifies caregivers of the appropriate time to change the dressing is demonstrated.
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