Reusable and recyclable quartz crystal microbalance sensors

In this communication, we report a simple procedure to recycle quartz crystal microbalance sensors. In particular we show that a sacrificial functional PS thin film deposited on top of silica (or gold) sensor does not influence the features and reproducibility of the benchmarked PSS/PDADMAC polyelectrolyte multilayer growth. A simple rinsing of the assembly with toluene at the end of a given experiment enables the reusing of the same sensor for tenths of times or more providing a neat economical and ecological gain; an approach that hopefully will spread out.