A Flow-Injection Chemiluminescence Determination of Formaldehyde in Textiles

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the multitude of experiments on determination of formaldehyde, no experiment has made any attempt to determine the exact amount of formaldehyde in textile materials by flow-injection chemiluminescence. In this article, flow-injection chemiluminescence analysis is used effectively for the selective determination of formaldehyde in textiles. The reaction is based upon the modified Trautz–Shorigin reaction, in which formaldehyde and gallic acid are oxidized with aqueous alkaline hydrogen peroxide, producing relatively strong chemiluminescence. The effects of reagent concentrations, temperature, pH, flow rates, mixing coil length, and flow sequences on the chemiluminescence intensity were studied. Under the optimized experimental conditions, formaldehyde in an aqueous solution was determined over the concentration range from 0.20–1.0 × 10−7 M with a linear calibration graph; the detection limit (LOD; S/N = 3) was 5 × 10−8 M. The relative standard deviation of 12 replicate measurements of 2 × 10−5 M formaldehyde was 1.1%. This flow-injection analysis system proved able to analyze up to 50 samples/h. The effects of various interferences possibly present in the textile samples were investigated. Most cations and anions, as well as organic compounds, do not interfere with the determination of formaldehyde in textile samples. The proposed method is very simple, rapid, inexpensive, sensitive, and can be applied to a variety of textile samples at low concentration levels without any enrichment treatment. This method was applied to the determination of formaldehyde in different textile samples and compared with the state standard method used in China.