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Published on: April 18, 2013
An Experimental and Numerical Study of Polyelectrolyte Hydrogel Ionic Diodes: Towards Electrical Detection of Charged
Chenwei Xiong1, Boyin Zhang1, Rong Zhang1
1Division of Chemistry and Physical Biology, School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China.
Abstract:
Polyelectrolyte hydrogel ionic diodes (PHIDs) have recently emerged as a unique set of iontronic devices. Such diodes are built on microfluidic chips that feature polyelectrolyte hydrogel junctions and rectify ionic currents owing to the heterogeneous distribution and transport of ions across the junctions. In this paper, we provide the first account of a study on the ion transport behavior of PHIDs through an experimental investigation and numerical simulation. The effects of bulk ionic strength and hydrogel pore confinement are experimentally investigated. The ionic current rectification (ICR) exhibits saturation in a micromolar regime and responds to hydrogel pore size, which is subsequently verified in a simulation. Furthermore, we experimentally show that the rectification is sensitive to the dose of immobilized DNA with an exhibited sensitivity of 1 ng/μL. We anticipate our findings would be beneficial to the design of PHID-based biosensors for electrical detection of charged biomolecules.
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