Flow injection spectrophotometric determination of anionic surfactants using methyl orange as chromogenic reagent

A flow injection(FI) spectrophotometric method for the determination of anionic surfactants was developed on the basis of the competition for the cationic surfactant cetyl pyridine (CP+) chloride between the acidic dye methyl orange (MO) and anionic surfactants. In a pH 5.0 medium the cation of cetyl pyridine (CP+) reacts with dissociated methyl orange (MO-) to form an ion-associate complex, causing a blue shift of lambda(max) from 465 nm for MO- to 358 nm for the CP+ x MO- associate. The MO- in the ion-associate complex can be quantitatively substituted by such anionic surfactants as sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (DBS) or sodium lauryl sulfate (LS), leading to an increase in the absorbance measured at 465 nm. This increased absorbance value is proportional to the concentration of anionic surfactants. Various chemical and physical parameters for the FI spectrophotometric method were optimized, and interference-free levels were examined. At the optimized conditions, Beer's law was obeyed in the range 1.4 approximately 25 mg/L sodium DBS for an injected sample volume of 180 microL, and a detection limit of 0.22 mg/L for sodium DBS was achieved at a sampling rate of 90 h(-1). Eleven determinations of a 16 mg/L sodium DBS solution gave a RSD of 0.4%. The proposed method has successfully been applied to the determination of anionic surfactant concentration in waste water and in detergents.