Silver selective electrodes using ionophores functionalized with thioether‒amide‒amine

Abstract

New poly(vinylchloride) (PVC) based liquid membrane sensors are reported containing neutral macrocyclic carrier as potential ionophores for sensing silver ions. Three macrocycles (L₁, L₂ and L₃) possessing two thioether, two amide and one secondary amine unit have been used in new PVC membrane-based sensor. At wide pH range of 4.5 to 8.0, these sensors exhibit linear responses in the concentration range of 1 × 10^–4 to 0.1 M and detection limit 6 × 10^–5 M for L₁ and 1 × 10^–4 M for L₂ and L₃ respectively with pseudo-Nernstian slopes between 43‒46 mV/decade for all the three sensors. These sensors have short response time (<15 s) and long life time as these sensors do not show any considerable divergence in their performance over a period of four months. These sensors exhibit good selectivity for Ag⁺ over wide variety of interfering ions like alkali, alkaline earth, transition and some heavy metal ions. These proposed sensors could be used successfully as indicator electrodes in the potentiometric determination of Ag⁺ ions and also to determine anions like Cl^–, Br^–, I^–, S2^–, SCN^– and CN^–. Potentiometric titrations for halide ions in a mixture using these sensors and new titration method for the determination of detection limits are reported.