P2.4.22 Forest and Disordered Carbon Nanotubes: Sensitivity Improvement of Electrochemical Detection in Miniaturized Devices

Miniaturization is a well-established trend in the development of analytical devices, due to the important advantages it offers. Detection for this type of devices has to be in accordance and therefore easy integration and the employment of simple instrumentation are common requirements. These are fulfilled very well by the electrochemical detection (ED) and therefore, it is gaining relevance in many of the applications where miniaturized approaches are required. However, the use of very small sample volumes (i.e. in the case of microchip electrophoresis, ME) implies the use of very sensitive techniques. Even when this is the case of amperometry, sensitivity improvement is still needed. With this aim, nanotechnological approaches can be envisaged. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are one of the nanostructures that, from their discovery, remain generating relevant applications due to the possibilities and advantages they offer. Due to their conductive properties, they have been widely used as electrode modifiers. In this work, CNTs are directly grown on a glass surface and evaluated for electroanalytical purposes. However, simply by varying the procedure slightly, materials with very different properties can be obtained. For example, different configurations, vertically and non-vertically aligned CNTs, provide different analytical characteristics. Therefore, a careful choice of the nanomaterial has to be made in order to obtain the best performance of the devices.