Abstract
There is great interest in understanding trinitrotoluene (TNT) and dinitrotoluene (DNT) contamination, detection and remediation in the environment due to TNT’s negative health effects and security implications. Numerous publications have focused on detecting TNT in groundwater using multiple techniques, including electrochemistry. The main degradation pathway of nitrotoluenes in the environment is reduction, frequently with biological and/or photolytic assistance. Riboflavin has also been noted to aid in TNT remediation in soils and groundwater when exposed to light. This report indicates that adding riboflavin to a TNT or DNT solution enhances redox currents in electrochemical experiments. Here AC voltammetry was performed and peak currents compared with and without riboflavin present. Results indicated that TNT, DNT and riboflavin could be detected using AC voltammetry on modified gold electrodes and the addition of riboflavin affected redox peaks of TNT and DNT. Poised potential experiments indicated that it is possible to enhance reduction of TNT in the presence of riboflavin and light. These results were dramatic enough to explain long term enhancement of bioremediation in environments containing high levels of riboflavin and enhance the limit of detection in electrochemically-based nitrotoluene sensing.
Highlights
There is great interest in understanding trinitrotoluene (TNT) and dinitrotoluene (DNT)contamination, detection and remediation in the environment due to TNT’s negative health effects as well as security implications [1,2]
Nitroaromatics have been studied using electrochemistry extensively over the past few years with multiple published techniques to analyze DNT and TNT with limits of detection near 10 ppb [5,6,7,8,9,10]. While this is of interest, to compete with high performance liquid chromatographic techniques for analysis of environmental samples of nitroaromatic compounds the limit of detection needs to be decreased by another one to four orders of magnitude [11,12,13]
The reaction sequence in Scheme 1 is based on the work of Grigoriants et al described in [7] and agrees with the recent literature [5,19]. We show this reduction of TNT as a three step process to describe the three redox peaks generated in the voltammetry
Summary
There is great interest in understanding trinitrotoluene (TNT) and dinitrotoluene (DNT)contamination, detection and remediation in the environment due to TNT’s negative health effects as well as security implications [1,2]. Nitroaromatics have been studied using electrochemistry extensively over the past few years with multiple published techniques to analyze DNT and TNT with limits of detection near 10 ppb [5,6,7,8,9,10]. While this is of interest, to compete with high performance liquid chromatographic techniques for analysis of environmental samples of nitroaromatic compounds the limit of detection needs to be decreased by another one to four orders of magnitude [11,12,13]
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