Determination of Trace Antimony by Square-Wave Adsorptive Cathodic Stripping Voltammetry at an Ex Situ Prepared Bismuth Film Electrode

A square-wave adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetric protocol to determine trace antimony(III) in the presence of gallic acid (GA) at an ex situ prepared bismuth film electrode (BiFE) has been investigated. A well-defined and sensitive stripping peak of the Sb(II)-gallic acid complex was observed at -0.53 V (vs. SCE) in a 0.1M acetate buffer solution (pH 4.8) at a deposition potential of -0.38 V (120 s). The experimental variables as well as potential interferences were studied. Compared with the ex situ mercury film electrode (MFE), the ex situ prepared BiFE displayed a better electroanalytical performance for the determination of antimony(111). Under the optimized conditions, the linear range was obtained between 2-25 mu g/L, the limit of detection for antimony(III) was 60 ng/L and the relative standard deviation was 3.37% at the 10 mu g/L level (n = 10). This method was applied to determine trace amounts of antimony in several environmental samples with the satisfactory results. C) (C) The Author(s) 2014. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.