Spectrophotometric and Spectrofluorimetric Quantification of Urea via Silver Nanoparticles Prepared by Wet Chemical Method

Abstract

Silver nanoparticles have been utilized in an easy, sensitive, and effective approach through spectrophotometry and spectrofluorimetry to quantify urea in water samples. Here, 1,3-di-(1H-imidazole-1-yl) -2-propanol (DIPO) was employed to stabilize Ag NPs produced from the reduction of aqueous silver nitrate by sodium borohydride (NaBH<sub>4</sub>). Beer-Lambert's law was applied for determination using the complexation of Ag NPs with urea molecules. The results show urea can be assessed concurrently with good results and percent recoveries. The UV-visible absorbance and fluorescence emission calibration curves were plotted at 445 and 471 nm wavelengths, respectively. Beer-Lambert’s law was obeyed in the 0.1-15 mM concentration range. A linear correlation for both UV-visible spectrophotometry and spectrofluorimetry was obtained on optimum conditions using the suggested methods having a limit of detection (LOD) was found to be 0.897 and 0.048, respectively. The percent recovery ± RSD by the spectrophotometric and spectrofluorimetric method was found to be 88 ± 19.7%, 96.67 ± 21.53%, 130.8 ± 1.33% and 102.3 ± 12.7%, 97.26 ± 5.63%, 111.4 ± 3.8%, respectively. Following a comparison of the obtained data, it may be possible to identify spectroscopic approaches with greater efficacy and efficiency that may be used to determine urea's presence in actual samples of biological and non-biological fluids.