Hello,
I just joined a laboratory for my end-of-studies internship that tries to develop a device that could help evaluate the chloride concentration of biological samples.
However, as you may know, biological samples contain on one hand cations such as Potassium or Sodium and on the other similar anions such as Bromide that are taken into account by the selective membrane they have tried to develop.
Therefore, I try to find a way to solve this problematic. My state of art until today was about a way to separate efficientely ions by their type and a way to get rid of the similar anions by oxidising them. Unfortunately, I found nothing conclusive and that is why I am asking for your expertise.
Thank you very much in advance.
Hi Yassine,
Probably, ion exchange chromatography will be suitable to detect chloride and dertermine it’s concentration. However, such a device can be quite expensive, especially if you don’t have to much of samples that need to be analysed.
Alternatively, you can look if there exist an ion selective electrode (ISE) that can measure chloride. These ISE’s exist for other types of anions (e.g. nitrite and nitrate) but I’m not completely sure if they also exist for the determination of Cl- One benefit of these ISE’s are related to the fact that its rather cheap, in comparison with ion exchange chromatography. Next to that, these probes can be used to monitor the Cl- concentration in the wastewater continuously (which is not possible with chromatographical methods)
Hi Niels,
Thank you for your answer. I am sorry I forgot to talk about what they already tested. They already tried an ISE but it is not sensitive enough to differentiate the different anions. Do you think that it is the only way aside from the ion exchange chromatography?
Hi Yassine,
The lack in selective is a major issues for quite some analytical methods, in particular when you’re dealing with fairly complex matrices (such as wastewater).
Unfortunately, there are not too much of alternatives. Other electrochemical analytical methods will probably also fail for the same reason. With ion exchange chromatography you should have no problems. Maybe the use of a spectrophotometrical method (with diphenylcarbazone, for instance), is also an option but just as the ion exchange chromatography, spectrophotometrical methods can be rather time-consuming.
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