Monitoring the Status of Anionic Surfactants in Various Water Systems in Urban and Rural Areas of Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, South India

Abstract

Facile, rapid, sensitive and selective spectrophotometric method for the determination of traces anionic surfactants (AS) viz., Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), Sodium dodecyl sulfonate (SDS), Sodium hexadecyl sulfonate (SHS) and Sodium dodecyl benzenesulfonate (SDBS) in various water systems collected from Tirupati (urban and rural areas) city with cationic dye such as Azure-A and Azure- was described. The method was based on formation of the ionic pair anionic surfactant-AAandAB in acid medium (pH 3.0 and 4.0) to give colored derivatives with λmax in the range 450 to 513 nm and were stable for more than 10 days at 35 OC. Beer’s law was obeyed for AS-AAandAB in the concentration range of 0.03 –5.4 μg mL-1 at the wavelength of maximum absorption. The optimum reaction conditions and other analytical parameters were investigated to enhance the sensitivity of the present method. The detailed study of various interferences made the method more selective. The proposed method was successfully applied to the analysis of Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), Sodium dodecyl sulfonate (SDS), Sodium hexadecyl sulfonate (SHS) and Sodium dodecyl benzenesulfonate (SDBS) in various water systems (urbanandrural). The results obtained were agreed with the reported methods at the 95% confidence level. The performance of proposed method was evaluated in terms of Student’s ‘t’-test and Variance ratio ‘f’-test which indicates the significance of proposed method(time, easy and accuracy) over standard method (MBAS).