Electrosynthesis of HKUST-1 on a carbon-nanotube-modified electrode and its application for detection of dihydroxybenzene isomers

Abstract Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) receive increasing interest in the construction of high-performance electrochemical sensors, because of their outstanding properties such as large surface area, rich active sites, tunable pore size, and high electrocatalysis. In this work, an electroactive sensing metal-organic framework material, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology-1 (HKUST-1), has been successfully constructed by the in-situ electrodeposition of metallic copper (Cu) on an electrode surface modified with Nafion-single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs-Nafion), followed by potentiostatic scan in benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylic acid solution. The HKUST-1 modified electrode was characterized by scanning electron microscopy, FT-IR and electrochemistry. Electrochemical sensing assays show that the HKUST-1/SWCNTs-Nafion modified electrode can effectively resolve the overlapping redox signals of the three dihydroxybenzene isomers (DHBIs), namely hydroquinone (HQ), catechol (CT), and resorcinol (RS), and is capable of determination of the DHBIs in real water samples.