Design and fabrication of a low-cost flow-through cell for the determination of acetaminophen in pharmaceutical formulations by flow injection cyclic voltammetry

A low-cost electrochemical flow-through cell is designed and fabricated to use in conjunction with a flow injection (FI) system. This detector cell used a centrosymmetric radial flow thin-layer geometry with a stainless steel auxiliary electrode and a reference electrode (Ag/AgCl) without a salt bridge. The 5H pencil lead electrode used as a working electrode in the home-made cell is an extremely inexpensive electrode which performs as well as the expensive commercial glassy carbon electrode. Optimum conditions for determining acetaminophen using the proposed FI manifold was investigated. Appropriate volume of sample and/or standard solution containing acetaminophen in pH 2.2 Mcllvaine buffer solution was injected into the proposed FI system and mixed with the flowing stream of supporting electrolyte (pH 2.2 Mcllvaine buffer solution) at an optimum flow rate of 1 ml min−1. The cyclic voltammograms were recorded over the potential range from −0.5 to +2.0 V with a scan rate of 40 mV s−1. Linear calibration curve over the range of 0.1–5 mM acetaminophen was established with the regression equation Y=3.68X+1.0157 (r2=0.9964). The recommended method has been applied to the determination of acetaminophen in 8 commercial pharmaceutical preparations. The percentage recoveries of the spiked acetaminophen in four tablet samples were ranging from 103 to 112 with the relative standard deviation in the range of 0.1–1.3%.