I am trying to quantify the amount of formaldehyde and formic acid in water. I have tried derivatisation using DNPH (HPLC) and PFBOA (GC-MS) but get no consistent results even with standards at low concentration. Does anyone know of an easy, reliable method for quantification down to sub-micromolar concentrations?
Formaldehyde react in an aquatic solution with ammonia and pentane-2,4-dione to diacetyldihydrolutidine (Hantzsch-Reaktion), which can be extracted with butanole and identificated by photometric UV measurement at 412 nm.
Is (capillary) ion chromatography an option? Formic acid should not be a problem there. You have to find a derivatisation method for formaldehyde, however.
Maybe two runs: First, just the water sample. Second, the sample with an oxidation agent which converts formaldehyde to formic acid.
ion chromatography could be an option (not sure if I have access to capillary though) and yes, I could run two samples and oxidise the second and compare differences to quantify formaldehyde. I will look into this, thanks
Formaldehyde react in an aquatic solution with ammonia and pentane-2,4-dione to diacetyldihydrolutidine (Hantzsch-Reaktion), which can be extracted with butanole and identificated by photometric UV measurement at 412 nm.
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