A novel electrochemical sensor for determination of hydroquinone in water using FeWO4/SnO2 nanocomposite immobilized modified glassy carbon electrode

Abstract

A novel electrochemical sensor based on iron tungstate doped tin oxide nanocomposite Nafion (FeWO4/SnO2/Nf) immobilized modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE) is fabricated to determine hydroquinone (HQ) in this present study. The structural morphology and phase of FeWO4/SnO2 nanocomposite are characterized by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), high transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) and Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) respectively. Electrochemical methods such as cyclic voltammetry (CV), difference pulse voltammetry (DPV) and amperometric (i-t curve) are used to describe the electrochemical performance of the surface modified electrode for HQ sensing studies. The FeWO4/SnO2/Nf immobilized GCE is exhibited excellent catalytic activity with the increasing current signal during HQ sensing. The linear range of response is obtained between 0.01 µM and 50 µM for HQ detection under optimized conditions and the low detection limit (LOD) is found to be 0.0013 µM. Moreover, the present modified electrode shows good reproducibility and excellent anti-interference behavior. In addition, the present electrochemical sensor is applied to the real samples of collected waters from various sources and the obtained experimental results are quite satisfactory.