Prospects of polymer Nanocomposite-Based electrochemical sensors as analytical devices for environmental Monitoring: A review

The human population is predominantly faced with diverse environmental pollutants including those in the drinking water, soil, air, and foodstuffs. Thus, developing innovative purification methods and effective sensing devices for these pollutants is a crucial challenge. Until now, susceptible distinctive traditional analytical techniques for pollutant detection including atomic absorption spectroscopy and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, have been developed by experts in the field. While the stated techniques benefit from high sensitivity, they are plagued by major drawbacks, notably complexity, high-cost, time consumption, non-universal approaches, sophisticated operational skill requirements and difficulty in deployment because of their huge size. Therefore, to circumvent the preceding limitations, electrochemical sensors that are sensitive, selective, robust, and efficient for performing real-time analysis of specific pollutants in complex environments are being developed. Significant developments in nanomaterials-based electrochemical sensors have facilitated the production of new technologies which guarantee human and environmental safety. Nowadays, researchers have amplified substantial effort to exploit various polymer nanocomposites for constructing electrochemical sensors bearing in mind their attractive features such as effective surface area, higher electrical conductivity and very good electrocatalytic characteristics when compared with the convectional polymers. Moreover, with the advancement of electronic technology, the compact electrochemical sensing system based on polymer-nanocomposites with miniaturisation has flourished in various fields. Herein, the first part of this review concisely addresses the most significant methods for synthesizing polymer nanocomposites and important electrochemical techniques. It then proceeds to sum up the latest applications of polymer nanocomposites for the fabrication of electrochemical sensors as an innovative strategy for monitoring and detecting environmental contaminants such as toxic gases, heavy metal ions, pesticides, and nitrites in different environments. Lastly, the present bottlenecks and future prospects for the construction of compact polymer nanocomposite based electrochemical sensors for environmental remediation are highlighted. This is presumed to furnish researchers with innovative research directions and horizons.