A steady-state and flow-through cell for screen-printed eight-electrode arrays Original Research Article

An electrochemical cell has been developed enabling amperometric steady-state- and flow-injection measurements with screen-printed arrays consisting of eight working electrodes (Ø = 1 mm) arranged radially around a printed Ag/AgCl reference electrode in the centre. The cell contained a rotator, providing similar hydrodynamics over all the working electrodes in the array, which was manually centered under the rotator. The reproducibility of steady-state measurements with eight-electrode platinum or gold arrays in this cell was studied by measuring and comparing currents from ferricyanide reduction at each electrode in the array. It was found that the relative standard deviation (R.S.D.) for the currents at different electrodes on one array was below 5%. Similar R.S.D. was found if measurements were compared between several arrays. This indicates that manual insertion/positioning of the eight-electrode array in the cell and hydrodynamics at the electrodes provided measurement reproducibility similar to the reproducibility of manufacturing eight-electrode platinum or gold arrays by screen-printing. A comparative study was performed between screen-printed and through mask sprayed carbon arrays. It was found that the reproducibility of the sprayed arrays was similar to that of the platinum or gold screen-printed arrays, with R.S.D. values below 6% regarding the variation between electrodes within the same array and the variation between different arrays. To enable flow-injection measurements, a tube (0.4 mm inner diameter) was inserted into a hole drilled through the centre of the steady-state cell rotator. This construction made it possible to inject the solution into the cell through the tube (not rotating), while the rotator was spinning over the eight-electrode array. It was found that this combination of flow-injection and mixing by a rotator provided a uniform current response over the array electrodes and that, at optimum conditions, the R.S.D. values between the eight electrodes in the array were nearly the same as in case of the steady-state measurements, i.e., below 5%.