Colorimetric Determination of Sulfide in Turbid Water with a Cost-effective Flow-batch Porous Membrane-based Diffusion Scrubber System

Abstract

A cost-effective flow-batch analysis approach with colorimetric measurement has been developed for sulfide ion determination in turbid water samples without using a conventional pump and valve. Under an acidic condition, sulfide ion was converted to hydrogen sulfide gas and liberated out from other complicated matrices. The porous membrane-based diffusion scrubber was utilized as a gas trapping unit for hydrogen sulfide gas separation/preconcentration. From the correlation of sulfide ion concentration and disappearance of sodium nitroprusside reagent detection by using a homemade LED-photodiode based colorimetry, a linear relationship of sulfide ion concentration and absorbance can be obtained with relative standard deviation (%RSD) less than 5%. The limit of detection was 5.6 μmol L-1. The proposed system was applied for sulfide ion determination in wastewater samples with the recoveries of 91.0 - 105.2%. The proposed system is a robust setup and able to handle turbid water samples without a sample filtering step.