Automated determination of nitrate plus nitrite in aqueous samples with flow injection analysis using vanadium (III) chloride as reductant.

Determination of nitrate in aqueous samples is an important analytical objective for environmental monitoring and assessment. Here we report the first automatic flow injection analysis (FIA) of nitrate (plus nitrite) using VCl3 as reductant instead of the well-known but toxic cadmium column for reducing nitrate to nitrite. The reduced nitrate plus the nitrite originally present in the sample react with the Griess reagent (sulfanilamide and N-1-naphthylethylenediamine dihydrochloride) under acidic condition. The resulting pink azo dye can be detected at 540 nm. The Griess reagent and VCl3 are used as a single mixed reagent solution to simplify the system. The various parameters of the FIA procedure including reagent composition, temperature, volume of the injection loop, and flow rate were carefully investigated and optimized via univariate experimental design. Under the optimized conditions, the linear range and detection limit of this method are 0-100 µM (R(2)=0.9995) and 0.1 µM, respectively. The targeted analytical range can be easily extended to higher concentrations by selecting alternative detection wavelengths or increasing flow rate. The FIA system provides a sample throughput of 20 h(-1), which is much higher than that of previously reported manual methods based on the same chemistry. National reference solutions and different kinds of aqueous samples were analyzed with our method as well as the cadmium column reduction method. The results from our method agree well with both the certified value and the results from the cadmium column reduction method (no significant difference with P=0.95). The spiked recovery varies from 89% to 108% for samples with different matrices, showing insignificant matrix interference in this method.