A Selective and Sensitive Method for Simultaneous Determination of Traces of Paracetamol and p-Aminophenol in Pharmaceuticals Using Carbon Ionic Liquid Electrode

reliable and simple electrochemical method has been proposed for the simultaneous determination of paracetamol (PAR) and p-aminophenol (PAP) in pharmaceutical formulations. The oxidation and reduction peak potentials in cyclic voltammetry (CV) for PAR on carbon ionic liquid electrode (CILE) were occurred at 370 and 225 mV vs. Ag/ AgCl, respectively at pH 7.0, while those for PAP on CILE appeared at 128 mV and 68 mV, respectively at the scan rate of 0.05 V s(-1). In comparison to the conventional carbon paste electrode, the apparent reversibility and kinetics of the electrochemical reactions of PAR and PAP were significantly improved on CILE. In differential pulse voltammetric technique, the peak potentials for PAR and PAP appeared at 345 and 130 mV, respectively, with the peak separation of 215 mV, sufficient for their simultaneous determination in samples containing these two species. The proposed method was used for simultaneous determination of PAR and PAP in tablets. PAR and PAP can be determined in the ranges of 2.0 x 10(-6) -2.2 x 10(-3) M and 3.0 x 10(-7) 1.0 X 10(-3) M, with the detection limits of 5.0 x 10(-7) and 1.0 x 10(-7) M (calculated by 3 sigma), respectively. The relative standard deviations for the determination of PAR and PAP were less than 2%.