A review on advances in application of polyaniline for ammonia detection

Recently, there is an increasing interest in ammonia sensing and detection for a wide range of applications, including food, automotive, chemical, environmental, and medical sectors. A major challenge is to obtain selective, sensitive and environmentally stable sensing polymer/chemical materials that can meet the stringent performance requirements of these application areas. Among various polymer-based sensing materials, polyaniline has emerged as a preferred choice owing to its cost-effectiveness, facile preparation steps, and superior sensing performance towards ammonia. In this review, advances in polyaniline based ammonia detection sensors are summarized, with a special focus on progresses in polyaniline modification techniques to achieve enhanced sensing performance. These techniques utilize interfacial and high dilution syntheses, multifunctional dopants, template synthesis, self-oxidizing template synthesis, etc., methods. Most up-to-date developments in combining polyaniline with other ammonia sensing materials, including polyaniline nanocomposites with metal oxides, graphene, carbon nanotubes and other carbon nanomaterials, are included. These novel nanocomposites have special capabilities of forming p-n nanojunctions or electron interphase interactions for superior detection sensitivity and selectivity. In addition, existing challenges toward understanding, reproducing, and optimizing the design of polyaniline based ammonia sensors are discussed. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.