Sensitive electrochemical detection of benzocaine based on hollow carbon nanobowl modified electrode

Benzocaine (BZC) is a widely used anaesthetic drug coupled with multiple undesirable side effects, thus developing sensitive method for its detection is of great importance; meanwhile, hollow carbon nanospheres (HCS) have received intense interests in electroanalysis resulted from its unique merits, but the related close structures restrain the availability factor of the internal surfaces, hence suppressing their analytical performance. In this work, a novel nanomaterial with open structure, hollow carbon nanobowl (HCB) was prepared and adopted as the electrode material for fabricating a highly sensitive electrochemical sensor of BZC. The obtained results revealed the as-prepared HCB can display more superior sensing performance than conventional HCS. After optimizing various experimental conditions including the modified amount of HCB, accumulation time and the buffer pH value, the detection of BZC was performed at HCB modified electrode, and a considerably low detection limit (4.0 nM) coupled with high sensitivity (2.1527 μA μM-1) was obtained. In addition, the further experiments demonstrated that the HCB modified electrode possesses superior capability in repeatability, stability, selectivity and practical application. It’s thus expected that the as-designed HCB-based sensing platform has important application for BZC and other targets detection.