Conductive Polymer nano-bioComposites (CPC): Chitosan-carbon nanoparticle a good candidate to design polar vapour sensors

Abstract Conductive Polymer nanoComposites (CPC) prepared from the dispersion of carbon nanoparticles into a chitosan biomatrix (Chit-CNP) have been successfully used to develop polar solvent vapours (water and methanol) sensors, by spray layer-by-layer process. Such CPC transducers give a quantitative response when exposed to water vapour that can be considered as a sorption isotherm and very well fitted with a Langmuir–Henry-Clustering (LHC) diffusion model. This model gives a new insight into understanding of chemo-electrical behaviour of CPC and appears to be helpful to optimise sensor design by tailoring transducer initial characteristics to suitable solvent vapour fraction measurement range. Moreover, Chit-CNP sensors selectivity allowed ranking vapours by relative response amplitude ( A r ) in the following order: water > methanol > toluene. The origin of this selectivity was not found into χ 12 the Flory–Huggins polymer/solvent interaction parameter but into δ p , ɛ r and d , respectively the polar component of solubility parameter, the dielectric permitivity and the molecules size of solvents. Surprisingly little influence of chitosan nature and treatment on chemo-electrical behaviour was found.

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