Spectrophotometric determination of micro amounts of tetrathionate via its oxidation with permanganate

Abstract

The reaction conditions of tetrathionate with permanganate were investigated by varying reaction time, temperature and amounts of sulphuric acid and permanganate. Under the optimal conditions for the reaction of tetrathionate with permanganate, both penta- and hexathionate were also oxidised; each one mol of polythionates (S x O 6 2− ∶x=4, 5 and 6) reacts with (x−1.5) mol of permanganate. The proposed method is based on the reaction of tetrathionate with a given excess amount of permanganate in a sulphuric acid medium and on the spectrophotometric measurement of the iodine as triiodide formed by the oxidation of iodide with the excess of permanganate. This method could be successfully applied to the determinations of tetrathionate (4 × 10−7 to 2 × 10−5 M), pentathionate (3 × 10−7 to 1.43 × 10−5 M) and hexathionate (2 × 10−7 to 1.11 × 10−5 M), and gave a higher sensitivity than any previous methods without solvent extraction.