Please find the reference on electropoymeryzing pyrrole on a screen printed Pt electrode, but should be plenty of other papers on this topic.
The simplest is to apply 0.8-1 V (depending on the reference electrode and the electrolyte) on your screen-printed electrode for 30-90 s in a deoxygenated aqueous electrolyte solution, e.g., 0.1-1 M KCl, that contains the freshly distilled pyrrole monomer (ca. 0.5 M).
1. Gyurcsányi RE, Rangisetty N, Clifton S, Pendley BD, Lindner E. Microfabricated ISEs: critical comparison of inherently conducting polymer and hydrogel based inner contacts. Talanta 2004;63:89-99.
How important is it to use distilled pyrrole and degassing process ? Is it ok for preliminary experiment to use CV technique with pyrrole in KCl only??
Well, stored pyrrole solutions are generally non transparently dark which gets after distillation uncolor. Quite a difference. The oxygen can produce side reactions during polymerization. If you are not worried about the side reactions and that you have already an uncontrolled amount of polypyrrole in your solution, than you can pursue as it is. You should get polypyrrole formation. CVs can be also used, they will however in my experience have rather broad peaks and large capacitive currents in the conditions mentioned. So the answer to the second question is yes.
Electropolymerization for forming PPy films on electrodes has been widely reported, and I am sure you can find a bunch of literature. When you use SPEs (such as these from DropSens), are they Integrated also with CE and RE? If so, you should just be careful that the PPy film should not be over extended to connect to CE (as the separate distance between WE and CE is quite short). As such, CV might be a better way as you can monitor the Growth of film on WE with the better control.
you can use two different method for Electropolymerization of PPy on screen printed electrode. cathodic and anodic electrodeposition of ppy are possiple.these methdes depend on your electrode substance. for example, if your substance is copper, Cathodic deposition of ppy on copper, with Chronoamperometry method is possible. for this purpose, A Cu screen-printed electrode, a platinum wire and an Ag/AgCl electrode were used as working, counter and reference electrodes respectively, in a conventional three-electrode electrochemical cell.
· you can see this article for more information: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.2009, 48, 8331 –8334
Cool, I have the same problem Lavaraj. I want to use SPCE from Dropsense and CV method. But, unfortunately I can't find any clear protocol to do so. Can you mention CV parameters which you successfully used for pyrrole electropolymerizing? I've read some papers that used a fixed potential (0.8 V) to do this, but they are from 1990s and did not used such screen printed electrodes.