CHAPTER 3: Mesoporous Carbon-based Disposable Sensors

Highly ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) is an attractive material that can be exploited in electrochemistry owing to its chemical inertness, highly specific surface area, excellent conductivity of electrons, well-ordered pore structure and tuneable pore diameters (uniform pore volume and size) in the mesopores range. Herein, we review the recent utilization of an OMC-based disposable electrode material, which has been devoted to electrochemical sensors and biosensors fabrication. The well-ordered mesostructure of three-dimensional mesoporous carbon is essential in those applications. OMC offers numerous favourable active sites for transferring electrons to sensing the analytes due to its characteristics, such as large surface area, oxygen-containing functional groups and numerous edge plane-like defective sites, which makes OMC a prospective material for the examination of the electrocatalytic behaviour of various analytes. Nowadays, the number of research related to OMC-based disposable sensors is increasing because of their excellent physicochemical properties. This chapter details recent developments on the design and fabrication of OMC related materials that are used for modified electrodes in disposable sensors. The chapter provides a basic understanding of the synthesis methods, a description of the structural properties and electrochemical performances and applications towards sensing and biosensing.