Massive engineering of spinel cobalt tin oxide/tin oxide-based electrocatalyst for the selective voltammetric determination of antibiotic drug furaltadone in water samples

Abstract

Furaltadone (FT) is an antibiotic veterinary drug belonging to the nitrofuran group. FT and its metabolite have carcinogenic and mutagenic behavior, and the excreted metabolite of FT has contaminated the environment. Therefore, the determination of FT in the environment is essential. In view of this, we constructed a low-cost electrochemical sensor for the determination of FT based on cobalt tin oxide/tin oxide (Co2SnO4/SnO2, CTO/TO) nanoparticles. The one-pot synthesis of CTO/TO nanoparticles was prepared by a simple co-precipitation method and characterized by various analytical techniques such as PXRD, FT -IR, FE-SEM combined with EDX, HR-TEM and XPS. Subsequently, electrochemical techniques such as EIS, CV and DPV were performed for the detection and determination of FT using CTO/TO nanoparticles modified SPCE. Under optimal conditions, the designed sensor showed good sensitivity (0.66 µA µM-1 cm-2), wider linear ranges (0.1–73 µM and 91–1022 µM) and lower detection limit of 39 nM. The designed FT sensor has been successfully applied to real sample analysis in water samples and the recovery results obtained are very satisfactory. Based on these results, we believe that the as-prepared CTO/TO will be a potential material for FT sensors in environmental applications.