Electrocatalytic Oxidation of Ascorbic Acid at Polypyrrole Nanowire-Platinum Nanocluster Modified Glassy Carbon Electrode

Ascorbic acid (AA) is a vital component in the diet of human, and it is known to take part in several biological reactions and is present in mammalian brain [1]. Various analytical techniques, for example, indirect spectrophotometric, solid-phase iodine method, and liquid chromatography, have been developed to study the AA content in food, drugs, and plants [2–5]. All these methods involve complicated pretreatment techniques and expensive instruments. The electrochemical analysis can avoid those drawbacks and would be a convincing method to determine the ascorbic acid. However, it is difficult to determine AA by direct oxidation at bare electrode because of the high overpotential, the fouling effect by its oxidation products, poor reproducibility, low selectivity and poor sensitivity. Nanoparticles embedded in polymeric materials were widely studied. Hybrid composite materials have attracted attention increasingly, owing to the combination of catalytic activity of metal catalysts and the conducting polymers. Different nanostructures of PPy involving membrane, nanowires, nanoring and nanoparticles have been prepared. Several researchers are devoted to deposit metal nanoparticles on PPy film and fabricate metal nanoparticle-PPy composite [6].In this paper, we used the PPy-Pt composite modified GCE to determine Ascorbic acid and obtained satisfactory results