Fabrication and characterization of Ni/Ag/Zn trimetal oxide nanocomposites and its application in dopamine sensing

Trimetallic nanocomposites are multiphase materials with a ternary metal or metal oxide. They are widely used as antibacterial materials, catalysts, and sensors due to their high specific surface area, excellent electron transport performance, and good catalytic behavior. To address the issues of high manufacturing cost, poor selectivity, and low sensitivity of traditional biosensors, this work reports the designing of dopamine (DA) electrochemical sensor by trimetallic nano-sensor comprising of noble metal silver with the transition metals nickel and zinc. Four Ni/Ag/Zn nanocomposite samples with different metals' molar ratios were synthesized by a green microwave-assisted coprecipitation reduction method. Morphological and microstructural differences due to different metal composition ratios were observed through scanning electron microscope. The four synthesized materials are composed of nanoparticles of various shapes with a dispersed multiphase matrix. XRD, XPS, and FT-IR techniques employed to determine the elemental and phase composition of the synthesized samples. Electrochemical characterization results show that trimetallic composites modified glass carbon electrode (GCE) has good sensing performance for DA; the sensor sensitivity is 0.96 μA/μM cm², and the detection limit LOD is 0.3 μM. It has good anti-interference and selectivity for ascorbic acid (AA), uric acid (UA), and various ion simulated biological environments.