A Miniaturized Voltammetric Electronic Tongue

Abstract

A miniaturized electronic tongue based on pulsed voltammetry has been developed. It was made by inserting three types of wires acting as working electrodes (gold, platinum, and rhodium; diameter 0.25 mm) into a platinum tube acting as a counter electrode (diameter 2 mm; length 4 mm). The arrangement was connected to a potentiostat controlled by a computer. Due to the small size of the miniaturized electronic tongue, and since no reference electrode is used, the setup is very simple and convenient. In order to characterize the analytical possibilities of the miniaturized electronic tongue, some initial experiments were performed. These include the determination of trace amounts of cadmium and lead (in the µM range) in 5 µL samples. Furthermore, the setup was placed under the real tongue of a volunteer to follow saliva composition during exercise.

Keywords:

• Electronic tongue
• voltammetry
• miniaturized
• multivariate data analysis

The Swedish Sensor Centre, S‐SENCE, is supported by grants from the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development and Swedish Industry.

Our research is supported by grants from the Swedish Research Council for Engineering Sciences and from the Center of Industrial Information Technology, CENIIT, at Linköping University.