The role of applied potential on particle sizing precision in single-entity blocking electrochemistry

Abstract

Blocking electrochemistry, a subfield of single-entity electrochemistry, enables in-situ sizing of redox-inactive particles. This method exploits the adsorptive impact of individual insulating particles on a microelectrode, which decreases the electrochemically active surface area of the electrode. Against the background of an electroactive redox reaction in solution, each individual impacting particle results in a discrete current drop, with the magnitude of the drop corresponding to the size of the blocking particle. One significant limitation of this technique is “edge effects”, resulting from the inhomogeneous flux of the redox species’ diffusion due to increased mass transport to the edge of the disk electrode surface. “Edge effects” cause increased errors in size detection, resulting in poor analytical precision. Here, we use computational simulations to demonstrate that inhomogeneous diffusional edge flux of quasi-reversible redox species is mitigated at lowered overpotentials. This phenomenon is further illustrated experimentally by lowering the applied potential such that the system is operating under a kinetically-controlled regime instead of a diffusion-limited regime, which mitigates edge effects and increases particle sizing precision significantly. In addition, we found this method to be generalizable, as the precision enhancement is not limited to geometrically spherical particles but also occurs for cubic particles. This work presents a simple, novel methodology for edge effect mitigation with general applicability across different particle types.