Copper Zinc Nanoparticle-Decorated Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Composite for Electrochemical Determination of Triclosan

Abstract

Triclosan (TCS), an emerging organic contaminant, is widely used in personal hygiene products as a disinfectant and antifungal agent and has been of concern due to its frequent exposure with acute health damage to human beings and their adverse ecotoxicological effects. The frequent detection of TCS in organisms makes it necessary to develop simple and fast technologies to control its routine usage. In this paper, a new sensor based on copper, zinc-bimetal embedded and nitrogen-doped carbon-based composites (denoted as CuZn@NC) was prepared for TCS detection by pyrolyzing the precursor of Cu-Zn binuclear metal organic framework (MOF) at room temperature. The performance for detecting TCS was evaluated using linear scanning voltammetry (LSV) and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV), and the proton and electron numbers of during TCS oxidation have been proved to be one to one. The results indicated that CuZn@NC can dramatically increase the current response, presenting a satisfactory analysis performance for TCS detection. Under the optimized conditions, linear response range was of 0.2-600 μM and the detection limit was 47.9 nM. Also the sensor presented good stability (signal current dropped only 2.5% after 21 days of storage) and good immunity to interference of inorganic salts and small molecular organic acids (94.1-103.7%). The good recovery rate (97.5-104.1%) for detecting spiked TCS in commercial products (toothpaste and hand sanitizer) suggested its potential for routine analysis of TCS in real samples.

Keywords: MOF-derived carbon, Triclosan, Bimetallic, electrochemical detection, Differential pulse voltammetry