Electrochemical Synthesis of a Polyaniline Network on a Poly(o-aminophenol) Modified Glassy Carbon Electrode and Its Use for the Simultaneous Determination of Ascorbic Acid and Uric Acid

A polyaniline (PAN) network structure was fabricated on a poly(o-aminophenol) (POAP) modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE) by using a three-step electrochemical deposition procedure, and applied to the electro-catalytic oxidation of ascorbic acid (AA) and uric acid (UA). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and cyclic voltammetry (CV) have been employed to investigate the PAN network structure on a POAP modified GCE (PAN-OAP/GCE), which indicated the formation of a 3-dimensional (3D) non-periodic PAN network with good electrical contract and the maintenance of the electro-activity of PAN in neutral and even in alkaline media. Because of its different catalytic effect towards the electro-oxidation of AA and UA, the PAN-OAP/GCE could resolve the overlapped voltammetric response of AA and UA into two sharp and well-defined voltammetric peaks with both CV and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV), which could be applied for the selective and simultaneous determination of AA and UA in their binary mixture. Under the optimum conditions, the calibration curves for AA and UA were in the range of 2.5 - 6200 and 0.5 - 450 mu mol L-1 with correlation coefficients of 0.998 and 0.998, respectively. The detection limits (S/N = 3) are 1.4 and 0.3 mu mol L-1 for AA and UA, respectively. Besides good stability and reproducibility, the PAN-OAP/GCE also exhibited good sensitivity and selectivity. The proposed method has been applied to the simultaneous detection of AA and UA in human urine with satisfactory result.