Voltammetric quantification of acetylsalicylic acid in pharmaceutical formulations utilizing copper wire electrode

This research describes the quantitative detection of acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) as salicylic acid (SA) in pharmaceutical formulations using electrochemical determination at copper electrode. The cyclic voltammetry (CV) technique was applied to investigate the electrochemical behavior of salicylic acid at a copper electrode. The anodic peak of salicylic acid (SA) was obtained at ~0.6V vs. Ag/AgCl quasi electrode in a phosphate buffer solution of pH 11.5. The measurement was made in a potential range of 0.00V to 0.80V, where all the reported potentials are referred to this reference electrode. The oxidation peak current was linearly dependent on the concentration of salicylic acid, which ranges between 0.05mM and 15mM with a detection limit of 14.9µM. Three different pharmaceutical formulations from three different brands were successfully analyzed for acetylsalicylic acid using the newly developed method. The acquired results and the indicated values had an RSD% of less than 2.02, which was in good agreement with the concentration of real samples.