Abstract
Depending on the mercury to metal ratio, liquid, paste or solid amalgam is formed. Solid and paste electrodes are more reliable and more comfortable in analytical approaches where a manipulation with working electrode is necessary (e. g., work in flow-through or chromatographic systems, in mobile laboratories, in methods which are based on accumulation of an analyte in one solution and measurements in an other solution).
Moreover, paste and solid amalgam working electrodes can be modified by an appropriate method and/or they can contain metal which interacts with analyte in a different way than mercury. These possibilities of amalgam electrodes make wider their electrochemical applicability.
Based on experimental measurements it can be say that amalgam electrodes allow in many cases not only to substitute HMDE but and offer new possibilities which cannot realizable with electrodes from pure mercury.