Hydrazine High-Performance Oxidation and Sensing Using a Copper Oxide Nanosheet Electrocatalyst Prepared via a Foam-Surfactant Dual Template

This work demonstrates hydrazine electro-oxidation and sensing using an ultrathin copper oxide nanosheet (CuO-NS) architecture prepared via a versatile foam-surfactant dual template (FSDT) approach. CuO-NS was synthesised by chemical deposition of the hexagonal surfactant Brij®58 liquid crystal template containing dissolved copper ions using hydrogen foam that was concurrently generated by a sodium borohydride reducing agent. The physical characterisations of the CuO-NS showed the formation of a two-dimensional (2D) ultrathin nanosheet architecture of crystalline CuO with a specific surface area of ~39 m2/g. The electrochemical CuO-NS oxidation and sensing performance for hydrazine oxidation revealed that the CuO nanosheets had a superior oxidation performance compared with bare-CuO, and the reported state-of-the-art catalysts had a high hydrazine sensitivity of 1.47 mA/cm2 mM, a low detection limit of 15 μM (S/N = 3), and a linear concentration range of up to 45 mM. Moreover, CuO-NS shows considerable potential for the practical use of hydrazine detection in tap and bottled water samples with a good recovery achieved. Furthermore, the foam-surfactant dual template (FSDT) one-pot synthesis approach could be used to produce a wide range of nanomaterials with various compositions and nanoarchitectures at ambient conditions for boosting the electrochemical catalytic reactions.