Rapid sensing response for phenol with CuO nanoparticles

Abstract

The human beings are directly or indirectly affected with the environmental pollution, excreted from the industries in the form of liquids such as inorganic and organic hazardous material. As compared to the inorganic chemicals, the organic aromatic compounds are more toxic for the nature. The phenol (PhOH), which is one the largest applied organic compounds in industries and hose hold chemical, which affect to the human health. Due to the wide applicability of copper oxide (CuO) nanomaterial in numerous areas such as optoelectronics, photocatalysis, solar cells, and energy evolution etc; easy to process and provide enhanced and rapid detectible responses against phenol is utilized in this study. The CuO-NPs were synthesized at low refluxing (at 65°C, 90 min) temperature and were well characterize via XRD (X-ray diffraction pattern), FESEM (Field emission scanning electron microscopy), TEM (Transmission electron microscopy) and FTIR (Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy), revels the spherical shaped morphology (∼10 nm). The NPs were pasted on a glassy carbon electrode (GCE) to ascertain their sensing efficiency against PhOH via three electrode system. The efficiency of modified electrode was evaluated under different parameters,concentration effect of PhOH (very low, mid and high) (1, 10 and 31 μL/100 mL of PBS) tested and discloses that the sensor efficiency is very high and concentration dependent at all detectable limits. The formed sensor was also tested with different potentials from 1, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 mV/s and it’s sequential to the potential. The chronoamperometry (CuO-NPs/GCE) was investigated in absence and presence and of PhOH at four different voltages +0.05 to +1.2 V from 0 to 1500s to observe the effect of time, which is time reliant. The reproducibility and stability were also tested in terms of cyclic response for seven days (RSD 2.13%), which further displayed that the processed sensor is much reliable for a longer period. To understand well, furthermore, a possible mechanism was also presented, based on obtained results.