ESPotensio: A Low-Cost and Portable Potentiostat With Multi-Channel and Multi-Analysis Electrochemical Measurements

Abstract

Electrochemical measurement methods are widely used to analyze various biochemical reactions due to their simplicity and versatility. Therefore, the development of potentiostats, electrochemical-based analytical instruments, that are low in cost but maintaining rich analytical features is highly demanding. In this paper, we report the development of a low-cost and portable potentiostat system, named ESPotensio, which supports six different electrochemical measurement methods and a multi-channel electrochemical measurement. The measurement methods it supports include the cyclic voltammetry (CV), linear sweep voltammetry (LSV), square wave voltammetry (SWV), differential pulse voltammetry (DPV), normal pulse voltammetry (NPV), and the observation of electrochemical response current against time based on chronoamperometry (CA) measurement method. Moreover, each of these measurement methods can be run semi-parallelly within three different channels. The electrochemical measurement precision, accuracy, and error of ESPotensio were evaluated based on the repeated measurements and the comparison with the commercial potentiostats. The results showed that it could produce highly accurate electrochemical measurements by having an average accuracy of more than 90% compared to the commercial potentiostat, Emstat Pico. Ultimately, the hardware design was determined accordingly to meet the low-cost demand by costing of only USD 21.4 for the total system realization.

Keywords

• Chronoamperometry
• electrochemical
• microcontroller
• multi-channel
• potentiostat
• voltammetry