Ultra-sensitive ethanol sensor based on rapidly synthesized Mg(OH)2 hexagonal nanodisks

Magnesium hydroxide (Mg(OH)2) hexagonal nanodisks were synthesized via a facile microwave-assisted hydrothermal process and used, for the first time, as an efficient electron mediators for the fabrication of efficient ethanol chemical sensor. The synthesized hexagonal nanodisks were characterized in terms of their morphological and structural properties. The detailed morphological and structural investigations reveal that the synthesized Mg(OH)2 hexagonal nanodisks are grown in high density, and possessing hexagonal crystal structure. Using as-synthesized Mg(OH)2 hexagonal nanodisks, an efficient and robust ethanol chemical sensor has been fabricated which showed a very high and reproducible sensitivity of ∼6.89 ± 0.01 μA cm−2 mM−1 with a response time of less than 10 s, linear dynamic range from 0.1 μM to 10 mM and a correlation coefficient of R = 0.9957. The limit of detection (LOD) was estimated to be ∼73 nM. This work demonstrates that the simply synthesized Mg(OH)2 nanostructures can effectively be used for the fabrication of efficient ethanol chemical sensors.