Electrochemical determination of acetaminophen in pharmaceutical formulations and human urine using Ag-Au bimetallic nanoparticles modified electrode

Abstract

In the present paper, the Ag-Au bimetallic nanoparticles (Ag-AuNPs) was prepared by the simultaneous reduction of silver and gold with dextran solution. A novel glassy carbon electrode (GCE) modified by Ag-AuNPs was employed for the voltammetric determination of acetaminophen (ACT). The nanoparticles were characterized by UV-visible spectroscopy method which confirmed the homogeneous formation of the bimetallic alloy nanoparticles. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed that the synthesized bimetallic nanoparticles size was in the range of 20-50 nm. The electrochemical behavior of ACT at the Ag-AuNPs/GCE exhibited a higher electrocatalytic effect compared to that observed when GCE was modified with each constituent of the composite and bare GCE. A linear relationship between anodic current of ACT concentration was obtained over the range of 0.4 to 10.2 µM with a detection limit of 0.54 µM. The proposed method was simple, less time consuming and showed a high sensitivity. The application of this electrode to determine ACT in tablets and urine samples was proposed. The application of this electrode to determine ACT in tablets and urine samples was proposed. The results analyzed by the proposed method was not significantly different from that analyzed by standard HPLC method.