Rapid and on-site electrochemical detection of bisphenol A and arsenic in drinking water using a novel electrode array

Abstract

The paper describes a novel dip-and-gauge hand-held sensor device for the rapid, cost-effective, and on-sitedetection of bisphenol A and arsenic in drinking water samples. Different working electrode diameters ranging from 1.5mm to 4 mm were designed and fabricated to construct a new electrochemical biosensor. The sensor was employed forthe chronoamperometric detection of bisphenol A and voltammetric determination of arsenic in drinking water samples.Bisphenol A measurements resulted in a detection limit of 10 ng mL −1 with a linear range of 0–4000 ng mL −1. Babyproducts and bottles have to be completely free of bisphenol and hence a liquid-phase microextraction method has beendeveloped to reduce the detection limit further to 0.6 ng mL −1. Arsenic detection was investigated in the concentrationrange of 0.4–250 ng mL −1 with a detection limit of 1.9 ng mL −1. The current study showed that the designed electrodearray allows low detection limits (below threshold levels), although a bare gold surface is used for the study. Hence,together with a hand-held sensor device that works by simply dipping the sensor chip into a water container, this costeffective system has the potential to be used either by household consumers or for on-site inspection purposes.