Development of a Cyclic System for Chemiluminescence Detection

Abstract

In this paper, we described a new concept of cyclic chemiluminescence (CCL) detection, and a homemade system was designed to realize such detection. The direction of the carrier in the CCL system is in a state of periodical change that can trigger a succession of chemiluminescence (CL) reactions in a single sample injection. Therefore, in contrast to the traditional CL detection, which only records a single signal, CCL allows us to obtain multistage signals. To evaluate the new method, the cataluminescence (CTL) reaction of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) on a nanosized catalyst was selected as the analytical model. We found that each CCL reaction has a unique exponential decay equation (EDE) to describe the change law of its multistage signals. Further study showed that the initial amount (<i>A</i>) of the EDE is linear with the analyte concentration, while the decay coefficient (<i>k</i>) is a characteristic constant for a given reaction. The formation mechanism of the exponential function and the determinants of the decay coefficient were discussed in detail. As a distinct application, CCL is capable of rapidly discriminating various analytes and even structural isomers