Enhanced performance stability of iridium oxide-based pH sensors fabricated on rough inkjet-printed platinum

Today, electrochemical sensors are used for a broad range of applications. A fundamental challenge is still the achievement of long-term sensor stability by ensuring good adhesion between the deposited sensing layer and the substrate material, e.g., a metal electrode. Until now, the most applied strategy to overcome this problem is to increase the surface roughness of the metal layer by mechanical etching or by electroplating of additional material layers, which both imply an increase in manufacturing steps and thus the final cost of the overall device. Alternatively, to overcome these adhesion problems, we propose the direct printing of a novel platinum nanoparticle ink, which is compatible with low-cost additive digital inkjet and with flexible low-cost substrates. This water-based platinum ink has two unique features: it leads to highly rough surfaces, which promotes the adhesion of deposited sensing material, and it is a highly low-temperature curing ink, compatible with polymeric substrates that cannot withstand high temperatures. Based on this concept, we report about a long-term stable and highly sensitive solid-state pH sensor functionalized by anodic electrodeposited iridium oxide on a rough nanostructured platinum printed layer. The sensors showed an excellent reproducibility with a linear super-Nernstian response (71.3 ± 0.3 mV/pH unit) in a wide pH range (pH 2-11). Long-term stability tests for over 1 year of application demonstrate an excellent mechanical sensor layer stability, which is correlated to the distinct roughness of the printed platinum layer. This novel approach is useful to simplify the fabrication process and with that the sensor costs.