Determination of Triacetone Triperoxide with a N,N‑Dimethyl‑p‑phenylenediamine Sensor on Nafion Using Fe3O4 Magnetic Nanoparticles

The explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP) can be easily manufactured from readily accessible reagents and is extremely difficult to detect, owing to the lack of UV absorbance, fluorescence, or facile ionization. The developed method is based on the acidic hydrolysis of TATP into H2O2, pH adjustment to 3.6, and the addition of magnetite nanoparticles (Fe3O4 MNPs) to the medium to produce hydroxyl radicals from H2O2, owing to the peroxidase-like activity of MNPs. The formed radicals converted the N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylenediamine (DMPD) probe to the colored DMPD+ radical cation, the optical absorbance of which was measured at a wavelength of 554 nm. The molar absorptivity (ε) of the method for TATP was 21.06 × 103 L mol–1 cm–1. The colored DMPD+ product in solution could be completely retained on a cation-exchanger Nafion membrane, constituting a colorimetric sensor for TATP and increasing the analytical sensitivity. The proposed method did not respond to a number of hand luggage items like detergent, sweetener, sugar, acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), and paracetamol-caffeine-based analgesic drugs. On the other hand, TATP could be almost quantitatively recovered from a household detergent and sweetener that can be used as camouflage for the analyte. Neither common soil and groundwater ions (e.g., Ca2+, Mg2+, K+, Cl–, SO4 2–, and NO3 –) at 100-fold ratios nor nitro-explosives of trinitrotoluene (TNT), hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine (RDX), and pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) at 10-fold amounts interfered with the proposed assay. The method was statistically validated against the standard GC/MS reference method.