Electrochemical behaviors of metol on ionic-liquid-modified carbon paste electrode and its analytical application

The electrochemical behaviors of metol on an ionic liquid N-butylpyridinium hexafluorophosphate modified carbon paste electrode (IL-CPE) were studied in this paper. The results indicated that a pair of well-defined quasi-reversible redox peaks of metol appeared with the decrease of overpotential and the increase of redox peak current, which was the characteristics of electrocatalytic oxidation. The electrocatalytic mechanism was discussed and the electrochemical parameters were calculated with results of the charge-transfer coefficient (α) as 0.45, the electrode reaction rate constant (ks) as 4.02 × 10−3 s−1, and the diffusion coefficient (D) as 6.35 × 10−5 cm2/s. Under the optimal conditions, the anodic peak current was linear with the metol concentration in the range of 5.0 × 10−6 ∼ 1.0 × 10−3 mol/L (n = 11, γ = 0.994) and the detection limit was estimated as 2.33 × 10−6 mol/L (3σ). The proposed method was successfully applied to determination of metol content in synthetic samples and photographic solutions.