Applied Chemical Engineering (2019) Volume 2 doi:10.24294/ace.v2i2.645 1 In situ Synthesis of PANI/CuO Nanocomposites for Non-Enzymatic Electrochemical Glucose Sensing Gul Rahman * , Mustifuz Ur Rahman, Zainab Najaf Institute of Chemical Sciences, University of Peshawar, 25120, Peshawar, Pakistan E-mail: gul_rahman47@uop.edu.pk ABSTRACT We report the in situ synthesis of polyaniline/copper oxide (PANI/CuO) nanocomposites and their characterization as electrocatalyst for non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose detection. Copper oxide (CuO) nanoparticles were prepared by wet chemical precipitation method followed by thermal treatment while the composites of PANI and CuO were synthesized by in situ chemical polymerization of aniline with definite amount of CuO. X-ray diffraction (XRD) results revealed that the composites are predominantly amorphous. The composite formation was confirmed by fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and UV-Vis spectroscopy analysis. The surface morphology was greatly altered with the amount of CuO in composite structure. PANI/CuO nanocomposites were coated on copper substrate to investigate their electrocatalytic activity for glucose sensing. PANI/CuO with 10 wt. % CuO exhibited good response towards electrochemical glucose oxidation. Keywords: Polyaniline; Copper Oxide; Nanocomposites; Electrocatalyst; Glucose Sensing 1. Introduction Diabetes mellitus, a chronic metabolic disorder, resulting from glucose concentrations lower or higher than the normal range (4.4–6.6mM) [1] . The increasing number of diabetic patients has compelled scientists to search for fast and stable technologies to detect blood glucose level. The development of rapid, simple, effective, highly selective, biocompatible, easily portable, environment friendly and inexpensive glucose sensors are extremely desirable in several fields including pharmaceutics, clinical diagnostics and food industry [2] . Enzyme-based electrodes using glucose oxidase (Gox), due to their selectivity and high sensitivity have been extensively used to design various amperometric biosensors for the detection of glucose [3] . Besides their potential applications in biosensing, enzyme-modified electrodes have a number of drawbacks, including inadequate thermal stability, high cost of enzymes, acute functioning environments and complex procedure of immobilization. Moreover, the environmental conditions such as humidity, pH value, ionic detergents, temperature and toxic chemicals can easily affect the catalytic activity of Gox [4,5] . Researchers are nowadays taking interest to develop simple enzyme-free glucose sensors with desirable properties of sensitivity, selectivity, environment friendly, stability, using simple organic and inorganic precursors. For this purpose electrodes modified with pure metals [6,7] , alloys [8,9] , metal/metal oxide [10,11] and composites of conducting polymers with other materials [12,13] have been developed. However, the high cost of rare metals, poor sensitivity, narrow linear range and and reduced selectivity to glucose, possibly due to the surface etching or poisoning during the electrochemical process have limited their potential applications in biosensors [14] . Hence, the development of a highly sensitive, cheap and free of interference sensor for non-enzymatic monitoring of glucose is still critically required.The organic conducting and nonconducting polymers due to their facile synthesis and low cost are nowadays used for the preparation of a number of nonenzymatic biosensors. The polymer provides a matrix for immobilization of enzyme or inorganic catalyst having a three dimensional arrangement and have been used for the detection of carbohydrates in alkaline and neutral medium [15] . The Copyright © 2019 Gul Rahman et al. doi: 10.24294/ace.v2i2.645 EnPress Publisher LLC.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/