Carbon nanotubes -based electrochemical chemical

Without doubt, the advent of carbon nanotubes has opened up iimovative perspectives for research and development of carbon electrodes. In this chapter, we have attempted to highlight the electrochemical properties of carbon nanotubes by rooting them mainly on their structural, electronic and chemical properties. If chirality of SWNTs could be controlled, it would be possible to probe electrochemically the unique electronic properties of the tubes with their corresponding unique DOS distribution and establish direct correlations between electronic structure and electrochemistry. However, so far, most of their electrochemical applications are based on ensembles of CNTs (MWNTs or SWNTs) in thin films supported on conductive surfaces or composites. Such ensembles, not so well defined from the structural point of view, contain a mixture of tubes with different diameters and DOS... 

Liu, G., Wang, S., Liu, J. and Song, D. (2012) An electrochemical immunosensor based on chemical assembly of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes on carbon substrates for direct detection of the pesticide endosulfan in environmental water. Anal. Chem., 84,3921-3928. 

Sol-gel materials are also known as an excellent matrix for embedding other species due to their tunable physical properties (e.g., flexibility and transparency), high chemical stability, and mild operating conditions. Especially, electrochemical deposition of silane-based sol-gel Aims is usually carried out under mild acidic aqueous solutions at pH 3-6. This allows the co-electrodeposition of silane with nanoparticles [47-50], carbon nanotubes [51-53], metals [54-57], polymers [50,58], enzymes [52,53,59-65], bacteria [66,67], and more. Thus, most of the recent research worlcs also focus on the electrochemical deposition of sol-gel-based composite Aims, with the concern of improving the films performance in corrosion protection, electroanalysis, microextraction, and so on and further broadening the films applications. 

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