Determination of rapid chlorination rate constants by a stopped-flow spectrophotometric competition kinetics method

Free chlorine is extensively used for water and wastewater disinfection nowadays. However, it still remains a big challenge to determine the rate constants of rapid chlorination reactions although competition kinetics and stopped-flow spectrophotometric (SFS) methods have been employed individually to investigate fast reaction kinetics. In this work, we proposed an SFS competition kinetics method to determine the rapid chlorination rate constants by using a common colorimetric reagent, N,N-diethyl-p-phenylenediamine (DPD), as a reference probe. A kinetic equation was first derived to estimate the reaction rate constant of DPD towards chlorine under a given pH and temperature condition. Then, on that basis, an SFS competition kinetics method was proposed to determine directly the chlorination rate constants of several representative compounds including tetracycline, ammonia, and four α-amino acids. Although Cl2O is more reactive than HOCl, its contribution to the overall chlorination kinetics of the test compounds could be neglected in this study. Finally, the developed method was validated through comparing the experimentally measured chlorination rate constants of the selected compounds with those obtained or calculated from literature and analyzing with Taft's correlation as well. This study demonstrates that the SFS competition kinetics method can measure the chlorination rate constants of a test compound rapidly and accurately.