ONLINE SAMPLE PREPARATION AND DETERMINATION OF PHENOLS WITH A FLOW-ANALYSIS METHOD

A Flow-Analysis system has been developed to automate the phenol determination according to the German standard method DIN 38409-H16-2. The automation leads to a significant acceleration of the procedure. One analysis only lasts 3 min while the complete manual determination requires 3 h. Also the sample, solvent and reagent volumes are reduced to a tenth of the volumes demanded by the standard method. The described phenol determination is based on the integration of an airsegmented ("Airsegmented-Flow-Analysis" SFA) part in a Flow-Injection-Analysis (FIA) system. The main steps of the analytical procedure are: Reproducible inserting of the sample in a carrierstream, sample pretreatment and sample measuring. In the first step the sample is injected into the carrierstream. It transports the sample in the reactioncoil and than through the distillation unit. The steam distillation represents the sample preparation step; therefore an airsegmented stream is necessary. Afterwards the different phases (liquid and gas) were singled again and the distilled solution is fed into the FIA manifold. The determination itself takes place inside the FIA system. The limit of determination amounts to 0.01 mg l-1 with a standard deviation of 1.5%. Different waste, surface and drinking water samples have been analyzed without any problems. The results correspond very well to those obtained by manual procedure.