Development of New Reagent for The Facile and Sensitive Spectrophotometric Determination of Selenium in Water Samples

Abstract

Spectrophotometric method was developed which is simple, sensitive and highly selective for the determination of selenium (IV) in various environmental samples using 4-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde thiosemicarbazone (4-DMABTS). Selenium forms a red coloured complex with (4-DMABTS) in acetate buffer medium (pH 4) which increases the sensitivity. Under optimum conditions the maximum absorption of colour complex was measured at 481 nm. The Beer's law was obeyed in the range of 0.05-11.0 µg mL^-1. The molar absorptivity and Sandell's sensitivity of the complex were as 2.3512 ×10⁴ L mol^-1 cm^-1 and 0.00276 µg cm^-2, respectively. The detection limit was found to be 0.020 mg mL^-1. Interference of the foreign ions was studied. The proposed method was successfully applied for the determination of selenium in various environmental samples. The performance of the present method was successfully analyzed by Student's F and t-tests.