Electrokinetic Manipulation of Silver and Platinum Nanoparticles and Their Stochastic Electrochemical Detection

Electrokinetic phenomena such as dielectrophoresis and electrothermal fluid flow are used to increase the rate of mass transfer of silver and platinum nanoparticles and improve their stochastic electrochemical detection. These phenomena are induced by applying a high frequency alternating current (ac) waveform between a counter electrode and a working disk microelectrode. By recording chronoamperograms at room temperature and various ac powers, it is shown that the ac heating leads to an increase in the collision frequency of studied nanoparticles with working electrode surface by a factor of ∼10¹-10³ as well as the increase in the magnitude of the measured faradaic response. It is suggested that the developed methodology could be used in the future to improve the detection of ultralow concentrations of various important bioanalytes.