Effective electrochemical sensor based on screen-printed electrodes modified with a carbon black-Au nanoparticles composite

A screen-printed electrode (SPE) modified with a carbon black (CB)-Au nanoparticles (AuNPs) composite is assembled and tested. Electrochemical and morphological investigations highlight the physico-chemical properties of the resulting AuNP-CB-SPE amperometric device with respect to SPEs modified with a single component of the nanocomposite. The effective performance of such a modified electrode in activating electrocatalytic processes, consisting both in oxidation and reduction reactions, is demonstrated. In particular, electrochemical tests on analytes such as glucose, hydrogen peroxide, hydroquinone, and ascorbic acid, evidence that the composite possesses electrocatalytic performance well superior with respect to the relevant mono-component modified SPE. As a consequence, a meaningful lowering of the peak potentials and improvement of the sensor sensitivities is observed when using AuNP-CB-SPEs with respect to both CB-SPEs and AuNP-SPEs. In the case of H2O2 reduction, the occurrence of the electrochemical process at less negative potentials is coupled to an improvement of sensor sensitivity of about one order of magnitude. Concurrently, lower limit of detections, ranging from 20 to 99% less, have been obtained for the major part of the analytes studied, i.e. glucose, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone. Preliminary results reported here indicate that AuNP-CB-SPE can be proposed as an efficient amperometric sensor to be used in many analytical applications.