Simple On-Plastic/Paper Inkjet-Printed Solid-State Ag/AgCl Pseudoreference Electrode

Abstract

A miniaturized, disposable, and low cost Ag/AgCl pseudoreference electrode based on inkjet printing has been developed. Silver ink was printed and chlorinated with bleach solution. The reference electrodes obtained in this work showed good reproducibility and stability during at least 30 min continuous measurement and even after 30 days storage without special care. Moreover, the strategy used in this work can be useful for large scale production of a solid-state Ag/AgCl pseudoreference electrode with different designs and sizes, facilitating the coupling with different electrical/electrochemical microsensors and biosensors.

Electrochemical detection of free chlorine at inkjet printed silver electrodes

“…Despite these facts, silver still holds advantages for electrochemical studies such as its relatively low price compared to the other noble metals, and, in the present study, its reactivity with chlorinated species and the possibility to prepare reproducible silver electrodes by inkjet printing. Similar approach was mentioned in the study by da Silva et al [36] for manufacturing Ag/AgCl reference electrodes. The main advantages of using inkjet printed silver electrodes over regular silver electrodes are the following: i) the inkjet printed electrodes are disposable and less expensive than common silver electrodes due to the smaller amount of silver employed, ii) a highly reproducible response can be achieved among different electrodes thanks to the fact that the electrode area is precisely defined by the inkjet printing processes, iii) the fabrication of Ag electrodes by inkjet printing is very flexible in terms of scalability simply by modifying the desired dimensions and geometries in the digital pattern files, and iv) a broad range of solid and flexible substrates is available.…”

Recent developments, characteristics and potential applications of screen-printed electrodes in pharmaceutical and biological analysis

“…Moreover, the surface of the WE can be modified with a wide range of materials in order to detect the electrochemical reaction of specific compounds. With respect to the production of the PRE, Ag/AgCl is the mostly used material, being silver and carbon inks printed as conductive tracks [45].…”

Inkjet-printed microtiter plates for portable electrochemical immunoassays

“…In the past few years, many efforts were made to develop and miniaturize reliable REs for sensors and lab-on-a-chip devices. Recently, a new class of SSRE without solid junction has been fabricated by inkjet printing of silver followed by either electrochemical or chemical formation of an AgCl layer [39,44]. Following the protocol from da Silva et al [44], 1 μL of bleach solution was drop casted onto the as printed and cured Ag patterns where AgCl was formed within 3 min (Step IV) [55].…”

“…Moreover, IJP can reduce the overall fabrication time and costs of an entire device due to the possibility of rapid iterative design changes during the sensor development stage and due to the up-scalability of the production rate from the prototype to the industrial level. In this way, IJP has been used for the fabrication of a broad range of chemical sensors based on gold on paper [39][40][41] as well as polymer substrates [27,42,43], silver [30,44] polyaniline [45,46] or CNTs [47][48][49][50]. CNTs are attractive functional materials for sensing platforms due to several advantageous CNT properties, such as good electrical conductivity, chemical and mechanical stability, high flexibility, electrocatalytic activity and reduced surface fouling characteristics for specific applications [51][52][53][54].…”