Amorphous carbon nitride as an alternative electrode material in electroanalysis: Simultaneous determination of dopamine and ascorbic acid

• a-CNx films are a new class of electrodic carbon materials that present several properties similar to those of BDD films.
• a-CNx and BDD were used as working electrodes for simultaneous determination of DA and AA.
• Electrochemical pretreatments on a-CNx or BDD modified the nature of the surface terminations.
• An anodic pretreatment in 0.1 mol L−1 KOH was necessary to attain an adequate separation of the DA and AA oxidation potential peaks.
• For the first time in the literature, the use of an a-CNx electrode in a complete electroanalytical procedure is reported.

Boron-doped diamond (BDD) films are excellent electrode materials, whose electrochemical activity for some analytes can be tuned by controlling their surface termination, most commonly either to predominantly hydrogen or oxygen. This tuning can be accomplished by e.g. suitable cathodic or anodic electrochemical pretreatments. Recently, it has been shown that amorphous carbon nitride (a-CNx) films may present electrochemical characteristics similar to those of BDD, including the influence of surface termination on their electrochemical activity toward some analytes. In this work, we report for the first time a complete electroanalytical method using an a-CNx electrode. Thus, an a-CNx film deposited on a stainless steel foil by DC magnetron sputtering is proposed as an alternative electrode for the simultaneous determination of dopamine (DA) and ascorbic acid (AA) in synthetic biological samples by square-wave voltammetry. The obtained results are compared with those attained using a BDD electrode. For both electrodes, a same anodic pretreatment in 0.1 mol L−1 KOH was necessary to attain an adequate and equivalent separation of the DA and AA oxidation potential peaks of about 330 mV. The detection limits obtained for the simultaneous determination of these analytes using the a-CNx electrode were 0.0656 μmol L−1 for DA and 1.05 μmol L−1 for AA, whereas with the BDD electrode these values were 0.283 μmol L−1 and 0.968 μmol L−1, respectively. Furthermore, the results obtained in the analysis of the analytes in synthetic biological samples were satisfactory, attesting the potential application of the a-CNx electrode in electroanalysis.

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