Electrochemical determination of formic acid using Cu-TiO2-NAF nanocomposite grafted onto Pt electrode

Abstract

Due to the importance of carboxylic acids in human activities, encouraging us to design a method for determination of formic acid. Herein, a new Cu-TiO2-NAF nanocomposite grafted onto Pt electrode was used as a probe for differential pulse voltammetric (DPV) analysis of formic acid. Different parameters have been investigated such as pH, scan rate, accumulation time, and pulse amplitude. The results revealed that, the optimum conditions were pH 2.63, scan rate 0.1 V.s−1, accumulation time 5 min., and pulse amplitude 50 mV. The fabricated probe showed a good selectivity toward formic acid in presence of different mono basic interfering carboxylic acids. The proposed method has been validated for analysis of formic acid at the optimum conditions revealing the limit of detection (LOD) and the limit of quantification (LOQ) to be 3.4 μM, 11.3 μM, respectively. The proposed probe has been successfully applied for the determination of formic acid in water and milk samples. The present method has the advantages of inexpensive, fast, selective, sensitive, and reproducible.