Design and Development of Fuel Cell Type Gas Sensor with Atomic Au decorated PANI/Pt Composite

In recent years, polyaniline has been of considerable interest and many gas sensors for detecting ppm level concentration of NH ₃ , NO ₂ , etc. have been fabricated. However, those sensors suffered from limitations of slow response time and selectivity problems. Gold deposited on polyaniline offers a solution to the slow response time by acting as a catalyst. By electrochemical techniques, it is possible to deposit an atomic-size gold onto polyaniline, thereby changing the electrocatalytic behavior of the polymer. In this paper, polyaniline/platinum electrode decorated with atomic gold for the application to gas sensors was studied. Discriminable patterns were observed from the cyclic voltammograms of such a modified electrode in n-propanol and i-propanol before and after atomic-size gold deposition.