engleski

Ultrasonic Extraction and TLC Determination of Surfactants in Laundry Wastewaters

It is known that industrial and municipal laundries daily use very large amounts of surfactants and fresh water while washing the garments from different sources (hospital clothes, protective clothing, hotel garments, etc.). Doing so, they are big source of environmental pollution with the anionic, cationic or non-ionic surfactants. Standard method of surfactant determination is UV / VIS spectrophotometric determination that usually follows long time - consuming standard flask extraction with chloroform, in which very large quantities of harmful organic solvent are employed. In this work standard extraction procedure was compared with the ultrasonic extraction, which was much faster, more efficient and was using much less organic solvent. Although the long - term effect of the ultrasound on the surfactants has been very well investigated, the aim of this work was to determine the short time effectiveness of ultrasound on the extraction method and to compare it with a standard one. Determination of surfactants was performed with thin layer chromatography and video - densitometry. This is fast method of determination of anionic, cationic and nonionic surfactants that can be applied under low cost in almost every analytical laboratory ; it needs less sample and much less organic solvent than standard UV/VIS spectrophotometric method.

thin layer chromatography; surfactants; ultrasonic solvent extraction

nije evidentirano