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The teaching of instrumental analysis for many small colleges and high schools continues to be stymied by high-cost, complicated maintenance, high power requirements, and often the sheer bulk of the instrumentation. Such issues have led us to develop inexpensive instruments as part of a SMILE initiative (small, mobile instruments for laboratory enhancement). This lab-based pedagogy, primarily aimed at engaging science and engineering students, has shown to significantly enhance the confidence and achievement of students in our technology-based courses. One instrument that has been designed, constructed, and characterized is the cyclic voltammeter (CV). CV is a versatile electroanalytical technique that monitors the redox behavior of chemical and biochemical species in solution. The CV instrument and technique readily lends itself to miniaturization and facilitates the practical application of CV analysis within standard undergraduate and advanced high school laboratory courses. The entire instrument was constructed for less than 50, thus allowing deployment of multiple apparatus in laboratories with a modest budget. Less noisy data was obtained when a commercial Pt working electrode was used, taking the total cost to less than 250. Together with details on how to construct the instrument, a series of experiments for the student-built CV have been described.
Mott et al. (Mon,) studied this question.