Development of Completely Automated Poly Potential Portable Potentiostat

Abstract

Various research activities related to profiling chemicals employ detection or measurement of the response from a specimen in terms of electric fields or currents. Hence, a portable poly-potential device forms one of the necessary measuring equipment essential to these domains. This work aims to propose a Poly-Potential Portable Potentiostat (P4), that can perform electrochemical analysis of solutions through easily integrable data-acquisition hardware and flexible software post-processing. The P4 device is based on a commercial development board, which provides an analog front-end (AFE) for working with 2-lead and 3-lead amperometric cells. An economical and portable design approach is prioritised while keeping the basic functions of the research-grade commercial instruments. A novel technique of dynamically changing the bias and reference potential is used to achieve a finer resolution, enabling qualitative estimation. P4 works by performing detailed mathematical post-processing on-board and therefore relies on hardware integrity as much as on software flexibility. Calibration of P4 was done using a standardised solution to function independently of any external hardware or software tools. P4 makes electrochemical analysis truly portable in remote or resource-constrained applications.