Layer by Layer Assembly of Graphene Oxide and Reduced Graphene Oxide for Electrochemical Oxidation of Bisphenol

Abstract

Here, we report fabricating graphene oxide (GO)_GO, GO_reduced graphene oxide (rGO), rGO_rGO, and rGO_GO electrodes through screen printing and study their electronic structure and properties for electrochemical oxidation of bisphenol A (BPA). The electroanalytical techniques used were cyclic voltammetry, Tafel analysis, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and chronoamperometry. The electron transfer mechanism for all the systems were investigated for BPA analyte. Though the research is just in its infancy, analysis of the data obtained so far showed that BPA interacted differently with each of the systems. The BPA oxidation peak current (Ipa) and peak potentials (Epa) for GO_GO, GO_rGO, rGO_rGO, and rGO_GO were determined to be: 1.93 µA @ 0.51 V; 1.47 µA @ 0.5 V; 0.8 µA @ 0.53 V; and 3.6 µA @ 0.5 V; respectively. Tafel slope analysis yielded values of 32.45 mV/dec for GO_GO, 55.4 mV/dec for GO_rGO, 70 mV/dec for rGO_rGO, 90.1 mV/dec for rGO_GO. These different values of Tafel slope indicates that the electron transfer kinetics is different for each of the systems. We intend to thoroughly investigate the interlayer interaction (ILI) process for these four different setups and how they contribute to the electrode/electrolyte interfacial charge transfer process.