Contact-Printing of Zinc Oxide Nanowires for Chemical Sensing Applications

This paper presents a new method for printing zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires (NWs) and their analysis for chemical sensing applications. High-crystal quality ZnO NWs are synthesized by chemical vapour transport (CVT) technique and directly transferred and aligned on a glass substrate by using contact-printing technique. With an accurate control of the contact-printing parameters such as load and speed over the entire printing process, a highly uniform, dense and well-aligned NWs layers are obtained on the desired substrate over large areas. The validity of the ZnO NWs as chemical sensing material is demonstrated by carrying out both cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopic measurements in different pH solutions. Results demonstrate a high stability of ZnO NWs to basic solutions (i.e. )., which shows their suitability for applications such as sweat or water quality monitoring sensors.