Voltammetric Determination of Paracetamol in Pharmaceutical Formulations at Iodine-Coated Polycrystalline Platinum Electrode

Abstract

In this work the modified iodine-coated polycrystalline platinum electrode was used to develope a voltammetric sensor for paracetamol determination in pharmaceutical formulations. The optimized experimental parameters for the determination of paracetamol were using 0.5 M H2SO4 as a supporting electrolyte with a scan rate of 50 mV/s. The anodic peak related to paracetamol oxidation was centered at about +0.60 V. The extended calibration graph was constructed between 1 ppm and 500 ppm. The anodic current showed excellent linearity with R2 = 0.9985. The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantitation (LOQ) were 0.046 and 0.139 ppm, respectively, which attests to the sensitivity of the method. The investigation for the effect of potential interferences from the content of tablet matrices indicated a specific selectivity toward paracetamol and the absence of any electrochemical response toward these components. The developed method was successfully applied to analysis paracetamol in three brands of pharmaceutical formulations and the obtained results were in good agreement with the labeled values, besides that, the statistical tests indicated no significant difference at p = 0.05 with a 95 % confidence level.