TAGRA 2024

In recent years, synthetic colorants have been used more widely in the food industry instead of natural colorants. Synthetic colorants offer many advantages over natural dyes, such as high stability to light, oxygen and pH fluctuations, uniformity in color, high brightness, minimum sensitivity to microbiological contamination, a wide range of shades and relatively low production costs. However, since synthetic dyes generally have aromatic ring structures and azo (N N) functional groups, they have many harmful effects on human health, such as allergic reactions, neurocognitive effects, behavioral disorders and toxicity. Therefore, alternative detection methods are required for the detection of toxic dyes in foodstuffs and real samples. For all these reasons, special attention is paid to nanosensors, one of the electroanalytical approaches, for the detection of food dyes due to reasons such as sensitivity, excellent selectivity, reproducibility, low cost, easy sample preparation and less time. In sensor applications, the use of electrochemical sensors based on nanostructured metal oxides (NMOs) offers many potential benefits and significantly increases the sensitivity of the system. In this study, undoped and K-doped nanostructured metal oxide thin films produced by USP (Ultrasonic Spray Pyrolysis) technique were successfully grown on glass substrates. Then, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM, EDX) and current-time (I–T) measurements were performed. As a result of this study, it was concluded that metal oxide nanocomposite thin film supported techniques can be successfully used in electrochemical sensing systems for the detection of azo dyes in food samples and for food safety.