The fundamental understanding of the electrochemical
transport
of ions at the interface of nanoscale materials and its immediate
environment lays the foundation to build electrochemical sensors for
a wide variety of chemical, biological, and environmental problems.
Therefore, enabling an efficient electron transfer from the environment
to an atomically thin, two-dimensional material such as graphene and
vice versa provides a route to building graphene-based electrochemical
sensors. Although many graphene-based electrochemical sensors have
been reported in recent years, there have been limitations in designing
and manufacturing them to monitor phosphate ions in the environment.
This limitation primarily arises from the lack of high-performance
printable graphene nanoinks (in terms of their combined electrical
conductivity and electrochemical charge transfer properties) as well
as complexity in the detection of phosphate ions. Herein, we report
the manufacturing of a high-quality graphene nanoink and its use for
the first time in fabricating stable and reliable printed phosphate
ion electrochemical sensors using a microplotter. These sensors demonstrate
a sensitivity of 0.3223 ± 0.025 μA μM–1 cm–2, with a limit of detection (LOD) of 2.2 μM
and linear sensing range of 1–600 μM. Moreover, they
exhibit high selectivity toward phosphates when tested in the presence
of NO3
–, CO3
–, Cl–, and SO4
2– interfering
ions, affirming their reliability as a sensing platform. Phosphate
electrochemical sensing using the proposed printed graphene sensors
will pave the way for future development of point-of-care and continuous
phosphate monitoring in environmental sensing.