Design of two electrode system for detection of antioxidant capacity with photoelectrochemical platform

Recently, a flow photoelectrochemical cell has been first developed and applied to assay global antioxidant capacity in our group. Yet, shortcomings of liquid reference electrode such as sample contaminations from the leaking of the reference solution, mechanically fragile, temperature and light sensitivity, etc. are significant restrictions for integration and miniaturization of photoelectrochemical sensing instruments, which have greatly limited their practical applications. Bearing these problems, in this work a novel two electrode flow photoelectron-chemical system (two-EPCS) has been developed for detection of antioxidant capacity. It is noteworthy that the electrochemical modulation-free mode (detection at the potential of 0.0V) is performed, which has greatly simplified the analysis process and will result in significant simplifications of the instrument integrations. During the sample analysis, both standard antioxidants and commercial beverages were detected. Results evaluated from the two-EPCS are well agreed with those of the traditional three-EPCS at low potentials. By unloading of the reference electrode, it is of great convenience to design a novel photoelectrochemical microfluidic chip based on the two-EPCS, which has also been successfully applied for antioxidant capacity assay. It is satisfactory that comparable detection concentration range and sensitivity were accomplished by applying the microfluidic chip technique. Moreover, the two-EPCS is verified to be a universal platform which does not depend on selected optoelectronic materials but pervasive for general photocatalysts. Such a two-EPCS should be considered as a feasible alternative to the three-EPCS, which will become a promising candidate for industrial and commercial photoelectrochemical sensing instrument integrations in the future.