Nanostructuring a gold microelectrode through electrochemical alloying-dealloying for nitrite detection

Nanostructuring a polycrystalline Au-disk microelectrode for highly increased catalytic activity and surface area has been successfully achieved through electrochemical alloying-dealloying in nonaqueous electrolyte of ZnCl2 in benzyl alcohol at 120C. Scanning-electron-microscope measurements show that the nanostructured gold microelectrode has honeycomb-like nanostructures characteristic of around 50 to 200 nm diameter pores and approximately 100 nm thickness walls. Voltammetric studies exhibit that the nanostructured microelectrode possesses a wide linear range of 2.010-6 to 0.1 mol dm-3 and a high sensitivity of 800 mA dm3 mol-1 cm-2 for the nitrite detection.