Exploring highly electro-active zinc peroxide nanorod for selective detection of hydrazine

Abstract

Hydrazine (N2H4), widely used as a raw material for producing synthetic catalysts, agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceutical products, has had an irreversible impact on air, water, and soil in the environment because of its high toxicity. To prevent making it lethal contamination should be monitored and detected. Here in this work, for the first time, Zinc peroxide (ZnO2) nanorods (NRs) were synthesized using a simple hydrothermal method to modify the gold electrode (AuE) for the fabrication of the ZnO2@AuE sensor. The fabricated sensor was successfully applied for the selective and efficient detection of hydrazine based on the chronoamperometry technique. According to theoretical calculations, the metal peroxide nanorods result in high oxygen vacancies, surface defects, and Zn ratios. This triggers substantial electron transfer, effectively enhancing the conductivity, electrocatalytic, and stability properties of the AuE with economic benefits. The effect of surface modification on the bare electrode was analyzed using the EIS technique. The ZnO2/Au electrode's electrochemical behavior towards hydrazine was studied using cyclic voltammetry (CV) at a scan rate of 70 mVs−1. Further, chronoamperometry was applied to investigate the effect of time, pH, nanorod concentration, and scan rate on the analytical performance parameters of the electrode ZnO2@AuE. The developed sensor (ZnO2/AuE) demonstrated an excellent detection limit (LOD) of 4.09 nM and good sensitivity of 2.4 × 10−2 µAµM−1cm−2 towards the oxidation of hydrazine having a fast response time (within 5 s). The developed sensors promise reproducible results along with good stability, which makes them effective for the electrochemical sensing of hydrazine. Such outstanding sensing performance is attributed to the tailored direct electrochemical redox surface of ZnO2, which led to selective sensing of hydrazine in tap, distilled, and sewage water. Keeping these features into consideration, our developed sensor can be adopted for real applications, especially for environmental surveillance.