Facile one-step synthesis of Ni@CeO2 nanoparticles towards high performance voltammetric sensing of antipsychotic drug trifluoperazine

Highlights: : • Ni@CeO₂ nanoparticles were synthesized by the facile co-precipitation method. • Ni@CeO₂ exhibits the highest specific surface area with large mesopore volume. • The fabricated sensor revealed the lowest detection limits and excellent sensitivity for TFP detection. • The modified electrode displays good selectivity in QCT, RU, L-Tyr, and L-Trp interferents towards TFP. -- Abstract: The sensing performance of magnetic metal-doped rare earth metal oxides raises a new platform to modify the electrode surface that exhibits fast electron transfer kinetics, increased conductivity, high surface area, active stability, and enhanced catalytic efficiency. In this work, we aimed at an electrochemical sensor based on Ni@CeO₂ nanoparticles with different calcination temperatures for the highly sensitive detection of trifluoperazine. The prepared Ni@CeO₂ were characterized for their morphology and structure using various spectroscopic techniques. The Brunauer–Emmett–Teller analysis of NCO-500 material shows a higher specific surface area of 104.46 m² g^–1 with mesopore volume is 0.3014 cm³ g^–1 owing to the synergistic effect between Ni and CeO₂, which gives a large number of catalytic active sites that leading to the superior electrochemical activity for trifluoperazine sensing than that of pure CeO₂. Under optimized voltammetric techniques, the NCO-500 modified screen-printed carbon electrode revealed a low detection limit of 0.007 µM with a broad linear response of 0.025–840.9 µM, and a higher sensitivity of 1.707 µA µM^–1 cm^–2. Furthermore, the constructed electrode demonstrates excellent selectivity, repeatability, stability, reproducibility and effectively applied to detect trifluoperazine in human urine and serum samples with good recovery results.