Highly Permeable Fluorinated Polymer Nanocomposites for Plasmonic Hydrogen Sensing

• Ida Östergren¹, Amir Masoud Pourrahimi¹, Iwan Darmadi², Robson da Silva¹, Alicja Stolaś¹, Sarah Lerch¹, Barbara Berke², Manuel Guizar-Sicairos³, Marianne Liebi², Giacomo Foli⁴, Vincenzo Palermo^4,5, Matteo Minelli⁶, Kasper Moth-Poulsen¹, Christoph Langhammer², and Christian Müller¹

• ¹Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg 412 96, Sweden
• ²Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg 412 96, Sweden
• ³Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen PSI 5232, Switzerland
• ⁴Institute of Organic Synthesis and Photoreactivity, National Research Council, Bologna 40129, Italy
• ⁵Department of Industrial and Materials Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg 412 96, Sweden
• ⁶Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering, Alma Mater Studiorum—University of Bologna, Bologna 40131, Italy

Hydrogen (H2) sensors that can be produced en masse with cost-effective manufacturing tools are critical for enabling safety in the emerging hydrogen economy. The use of melt-processed nanocomposites in this context would allow the combination of the advantages of plasmonic hydrogen detection with polymer technology; an approach which is held back by the slow diffusion of H2 through the polymer matrix. Here, we show that the use of an amorphous fluorinated polymer, compounded with colloidal Pd nanoparticles prepared by highly scalable continuous flow synthesis, results in nanocomposites that display a high H2 diffusion coefficient in the order of 10–5 cm2 s–1. As a result, plasmonic optical hydrogen detection with melt-pressed fluorinated polymer nanocomposites is no longer limited by the diffusion of the H2 analyte to the Pd nanoparticle transducer elements, despite a thickness of up to 100 μm, thereby enabling response times as short as 2.5 s at 100 mbar (≡10 vol. %) H2. Evidently, plasmonic sensors with a fast response time can be fabricated with thick, melt-processed nanocomposites, which paves the way for a new generation of robust H2 sensors.

Read the publication that featured this abstract