Using Galistan to fabricate porous gold electrodes: Toward non-enzymatic glucose fuel cells with enhanced performance for driving wearable/bioelectronic devices

Abstract

This paper presents a new facile route for the fabrication of enzyme-free porous gold electrodes (PGEs) which can directly convert the chemical energy of glucose into electricity. The method is low-cost and does not require any special equipment: porous gold is simply grown on carbon paper containing liquid metal particles. As a first proof-of-concept, we report on the fabrication of circular PGEs having a diameter of 12.5 mm. When immersed in a 10 mM glucose solution, such PGEs can produce up to 25 μW (maximum power density 10 μW•cm -2 at 45 μA•cm -2 ). Because the process presented is versatile and scalable, we envision PGEs with long-term stability that could be stacked to meet the power budget of various wearable/bioelectronic devices.