Nitrogen-doped hollow bowl-like carbon as highly effective sensing material for electroanalysis

Abstract

Hollow carbon nanosphere (HCS) has received considerable attentions in electroanalysis owing to its unique advantages in surface area, conductivity, stability and cost, while what is ignored is that the close structure with full sphere of HCS generally causes a great loss in its utility ratio of internal surface and its loading density. In this work, a novel hollow bowl-like carbon nanomaterial (HBCs) with open macropore network, nitrogen-doped HBCs (NHBCs), was designed and used as a highly effective sensing material in electroanalysis for the first time. Selecting carbendazim (CBZ), acetaminophen (ACAP) and dopamine (DA) as three representative analytes respectively from pesticides, environmental pollutants and biomolecules, the analytical performances of NHBCs modified electrode towards these analytes were evaluated. The results demonstrated that NHBCs can exhibit much better analytical performances than nitrogen doped HCS (NHCS). After optimizing various analytical conditions, NHBCs modified electrode possesses considerably low analytical limits and wide linearities towards three analytes: 2.7 nM and 0.005 to 8.0 μM for CBZ, 4.9 nM and 0.01 to 35.0 μM for ACAP, 7.6 nM and 0.05 to 125.0 μM for DA, revealing that the as-proposed HBCs-based material has great potential applications in electrochemical sensing.