Sequential injection spectrophotometric determination of nanomolar nitrite in seawater by on-line preconcentration with HLB cartridge

The unstable state of nitrite results in its very low concentration in seawater, which is below the limit of detection (LOD) of conventional techniques of analysis. Some sensitivity-enhanced methods have been proposed for the determination of nitrite at nanomolar level to illustrate the role of nitrite in the marine nitrogen cycle. However, most of previous reports are not widely accepted, because of their complexity and cost equipment or intensive labor requirement. In this study, a simple automatic system for the determination of nanomolar level nitrite using on-line preconcentration with spectrophotometric detection was described. An Oasis HLB cartridge was adopted to quantitatively enrich the pink-colored azo compound, formed from nitrite via Griess reaction. The cartridge was rinsed with water and ethanol (volume fraction is 55%, the same below), in turn, then eluted by an eluent containing 50% ethanol and 0.25 M(mol/dm³) H₂SO₄, and determined at 543 nm with a 2 cm path-length flow cell. Under the optimized experimental conditions, the calibration curve showed a good linearity in the range of 1.4-85.7 nM, and the LOD (3σ) was estimated to be 0.5 nM. The relative standard deviations of 7 measurements were 4.0% and 1.0% for the samples spiked at 7.1 and 28.6 nM, respectively. The recoveries for the different natural water samples were between 92.2%-108.4%. Each HLB cartridge could be reused for at least 50 times. As compared with other SPE methods, the advantages of this method included the free of interference from salinity variation and less sample consuming. The results of the application of the proposed method to natural water showed good agreement with liquid waveguide capillary cell detection method.