A green analytical procedure for sensitive and selective determination of iron in water samples by flow-injection solid-phase spectrophotometry

A greener analytical procedure based on flow-injection solid-phase spectrophotometry is proposed for iron determination. Iron(II) is reversibly retained on 1-(2-thiazolylazo)-2-naphthol immobilized on C18-bonded silica, yielding a brown complex. The metal ion is eluted as iron(II) with a small volume of a diluted acid solution without removing the immobilized reagent, which can be used for at least 100 determinations. Other chemicals (buffer and reducing agent) were carefully selected taking into account the analytical performance and toxicity. The developed procedure is 10-fold more sensitive in comparison to the analogous procedure based on measurements in solution, being suitable for the determination of iron in water samples with good accuracy and precision. The detection limit (99.7% confidence level), sampling rate and coefficient of variation (n = 10) were estimated as 15 μg L⁻¹, 25 measurements per hour and 4.0%, respectively. The proposed procedure involves a reduced effluent generation (3.6 mL per determination) and consumes micro amounts of reagents.