Determination of cyanide and thiocyanate by a spectrophotometric flow-injection method

A rapid spectrophotometric flow-injection method is described for the determination of cyanide and thiocyanate. The method involves a two-step procedure in which the total concentration of both species is first determined (using sodium isonicotinate/sodium barbiturate reagents), after which the cyanide is complexed with nickel(II) and thiocyanate is quantified separately; the cyanide concentration is calculated by difference. Various parameters such as pH, temperature and nickel concentration were optimized. The method is applied to synthetic sample solutions and the results are compared with those obtained by the ASTM distillation method. The limits of detection for cyanide and thiocyanate are 0.05 and 0.08 μg ml^?1, respectively, with a sample throughput rate of 10 h^?1.