Disposal Screen-Printed Carbon Paste Electrodes for the Potentiometric Titration of Surfactants

Tamer Awad ^*1, Gehad G. Mohamed ², Elmorsy Khaled ³

1) Egyptian patent office, Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, 101Kasr El-Aini St.,  

Cairo,Egypt

²) Chemistry Department, Faculty of Science, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt

³) Microanalysis Laboratory, Applied Organic Chemistry Department, National Research  

Centre, Dokki, Cairo, Egypt

E-mail: tamerpat@yahoo.com

Abstract

A simple, reliable, rapid and reproducible method for mass production of disposable carbon paste electrodes using screen-printing technology is described. The printed disposable potentiometric strips containing both the working and reference electrodes are utilized as an end point indicator electrode for the potentiometric titration of different ionic surfactants in their different samples. The preparation of the homemade printing carbon ink and the factors affecting the electrode performance with this technology are shown and discussed in details. The analytical performances of the printed electrodes are compared with those for carbon paste, coated-wire, coated graphite and polyvinyl chloride electrodes. The printed strips are found to have no preconditioning before application in the potentiometric titration of surfactants and have a very short response time reaching 3 seconds with adequate shelflife (3 months). The proposed disposable strips have been successfully used for the potentiometric titration of the cationic and anionic surfactants in their analytical grad solutions, pharmaceutical preparations, detergents and water samples with sensitivity comparable with the official method and ability of field measurement.

Keywords: Surfactants; Screen-printed electrodes; Potentiometric titration; Pharmaceutical preparations; Detergents; Water samples.

^∗ Corresponding author: (Tamer Awad El-Sayed Ali) (Egyptian patent office, Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, 101Kasr El-Aini St., Cairo, Egypt) Tel.: +20 106890640; Fax: +20 2 27921273