Application of thermally reduced graphene oxide modified electrode in simultaneous determination of dihydroxybenzene isomers

Thermally reduced graphene oxide (TRGO) was used as an excellent electrocatalyst for the construction of electrochemical sensor for simultaneous determination of dihydroxybenzene isomers including hydroquinone (HQ), catechol (CC) and resorcinol (RC). The surface morphology and structure of TRGO were investigated by utilizing transmission electron microscope, scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscope, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. The electrode modified with TRGO shows excellent electrocatalytic activity toward the oxidation of HQ, CC and RC. As a result, the oxidation peaks of three isomers in pH 6.0 PBS can be clearly discriminated due to large peak potential separation among them. In addition, HQ and CC can be simultaneously determined by using differential pulse voltammetry without any separation step. Under the optimized condition, the detection limits of HQ and CC are 0.75 and 0.8 μM (S/N = 3) with linear ranges of 1–500 μM in the presence of 50 μM isomer, respectively. The proposed method was successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of CC and HQ in synthetic water sample with reliable recovery. The proposed sensor has some important advantages such as low cost, ease of preparation, good stability and high reproducibility. Therefore, the present work promises for the application of graphene modified electrode in the simultaneous determination of multiple analytes.