Electrochemical preparation of nanostructured ZnO modified glassy carbon electrode for electrocatalytic determination of Acetaminophen

In this work, a new selective method for detection of acetaminophen using modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE) with a zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles was introduced. The ZnO nanoparticles was electrochemically deposited on the glassy carbon electrode (GCE) [1]. The morphology and structure of ZnO nanoparticles were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray (EDX). The ZnO nanoparticles modified electrode shows excellent electrocatalytic activity for acetaminophen oxidation in phosphate buffer (pH=7) solution. The electrode exhibits a good linear relationship and the low limit of detection and also it showed good sensitivity, selectivity and stability, reproducibility and fast response. The proposed method has been applied to the determination of acetaminophen in drugs and biological samples. The parameters of charge transfer coefficient (α), diffusion coefficient (D), electrode surface area (A) were determined. Under the optimal conditions, the current response of the electrochemical sensor obtained with differential pulse voltammetry technique was increased linearly with acetaminophen concentrations in the range of 8.0×10−6 -1.6×10−4M with the detection limit of 4.3×10−6M (S/N=3).