Reliable and inexpensive dissolved oxygen sensing materials

Abstract Bare, non-pretreated platinum wires and screen-printed platinum electrodes were used as both working and counter electrodes in the measurement of dissolved oxygen using a chronoamperometric method. The oxygen reduction current response in the diffusion state was used for a linear determination of air saturation. We evaluated the two different materials in general for their sensing performance such as conditioning time, accuracy, resolution and stability over 13 h of continuous mid-term measurement. A good performance was found for the wire electrodes in terms of accuracy with a current slope of 1.0–1.6 µA (% as)-1 and a resolution of 10–15 nA (Lowest Level of Detection = 0.1% as), but with an unstable current response result over the course of the measurement. The screen-printed electrodes have a resolution of 10–18 nA (Lowest Level of Detection = 0.6–0.8% as) and an accuracy of 620–660 nA (% as)-1 but they showed promising reproducibility and stability. Both materials require several hours of conditioning in the chronoamperometric method before a stable current response is achieved. For biotechnological applications, the platinum screen printed electrodes were evaluated in typical parameter settings (pH 4.0 and 7.4, salinity 0.1 to 10x phosphate buffered saline and temperature 12 to 42 °C) and showed correlations between the response time and stability and the temperature. No correlations were found between salinity, pH and the current response. In this paper, we present inexpensive electrode materials and a simple to implement chronoamperometric method for reliable direct measurement of dissolved oxygen in aqueous media. Graphical abstract