Nowadays glucose detection is of great importance in the fields of biological, environmental, and clinical analyzes. In this research, we report a zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorod powder surface-coated with carbon material for non-enzymatic glucose sensor applications through a hydrothermal process and chemical vapor deposition method. A series of tests, including crystallinity analysis, microstructure observation, and electrochemical property investigations were carried out. For the cyclic voltammetric (CV) glucose detection, the low detection limit of 1 mM with a linear range from 0.1 mM to 10 mM was attained. The sensitivity was 2.97 μA/cm²mM, which is the most optimized ever reported. With such good analytical performance from a simple process, it is believed that the nanocomposites composed of ZnO nanorod powder surface-coated with carbon material are promising for the development of cost-effective non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose biosensors with high sensitivity.

In this work, a miniemulsion template method was proposed to prepare a porous polymeric monolith with an inter-connected structure. The preparation of a porous monolith with sub-micrometer pore structure was realized and showed great potential to prepare a nanoscale porous monolith with an inter-connected structure. A medium internal phase miniemulsion was employed as a template to prepare the polymeric monolith with an open-cellular structure. The porosity was decreased to 47%, which increased the mechanical strength of the porous monolith more than 40 times compared with those prepared from conventional high internal phase emulsion polymerization methods.