Electrochemical sensor based on ion-selective membrane of silica/polyaniline nano-composites for selective determination of uranyl ions

Abstract

Life threatening impacts of uranium have necessitated its detection and determination in economically feasible way before it arrives in living bodies. Therefore, a new form of UO22+ ion-selective electrode has been fabricated based on membrane of silica/polyaniline core-shell nano-composites, in-spite of traditionally used ionophores, because of intrinsically conducting nature of polyaniline. For the synthesis of these nano-composites, silica has been extracted from rice straw in its cristobalite form, whereas the layer of polyaniline shell has been grafted on silica nanoparticles through in-situ chemical oxidative polymerization technique by cautiously maintaining the electro-active nature of these core-shell nano-composites. The chemical composition, purity, topography, morphology and surface polarity of this nano-composite assembly have been studied through various spectroscopic techniques such as, FT-IR, EDS, FESEM, UV–Vis, DLS and Raman spectroscopy. The results confirm that silica/polyaniline nano-composites have been synthesized with desired semi-cavities and electrostatic surface charge, which is responsible for binding with target cation, i.e., UO22+for its potentiometric determination in aqueous medium even in the presence of interfering metal ions. The designed potentiometric sensor has shown fast and stable linear response in concentration range of 1 × 10−6 to 1 × 10−2 M with the limit of detection of 1.4 × 10−7 M which is 100-folds lower than the detection limit calculated using spectrofluorometry. In addition to this, the proposed UO22+ion-selective electrode has been successfully employed as an indicator electrode for the determination of uranyl ions in complexometric titration and for the estimation of UO22+ions in real life based environmental sample, i.e., soil.