Henry Setiyanto, Sri Rahmadhani, Sukandar Sukandar, Vienna Saraswaty, Muhammad Ali Zulfikar, Nandang Mufti
Phenol is a very important chemical compound in life, especially in industry. Various methods of phenol analysis have been developed due to the harmful effect of phenol wastes that pollute the waters. A method employed to analyze phenol with simple instrumentation having good selectivity and sensitivity was a potentiometric method, which used a carbon paste electrode as the working electrode and was modified with a molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs). The carbon paste electrode was electrochemically modified using a 15-cycle cyclic voltammetry technique at a potential range of-0.2 V-1.0 V and scan rate of 100 mV/s with composition of the solution being 0.1 mM phenol: 0.2 mM aniline in a buffer solution having pH value of 9 and 0.1 M KCl as supporting electrolyte. Phenol was extracted from the polymer matrix electrochemically using 0.1 M HCl, thus expecting to form templates that can specifically recognize the molecule. The results showed that the phenolic content analysis, via a potentiometric method using MIPs-modified carbon paste electrode, had a linear range of 10-7 M-10-1 M with a detection limit of 2.5 x 10-7 M. Besides, this electrode can respond to analytes within 60-70 s. The accuracy was determined based on the relative error value (% Er). The % Er obtained ranged from 1% to 3%, indicating that this method is quite accurate for the determination of phenol. The precision was identified with a good coefficient of variation, which was less than 2%. The effect of interference compounds was observed in the small selectivity coefficient (KA, Bpot < 1), thus inferring that these electrodes have a higher selectivity towards phenol than other compounds contained in the sample. As a comparison, phenol measurements were carried out using the UV-Vis spectrophotometric method. Based on the percent recovery value and t-test, where ttable 4.30 > texp 1.12, it can be concluded that measurement with a potentiometric method using MIPs-modified carbon paste working electrode has no significant difference compared to the UV-Vis spectrophotometric method. © 2020 The Authors.
Analytical Chemistry Research Group, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia; Waste and Air Management Research Group, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia; Research Unit for Clean Technology, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Bandung, Indonesia; Department of Physics, Universitas Negeri Malang, Malang, Indonesia
