engleski

Application of ion chromatography in fertilizer industry wastewater analysis

The use of nitrogen containing fertilizers increases the nitrate concentration in the soil. Ammonium, nitrite, nitrate and phosphate, owning to their high solubility and mobility within the soil, are gradually increasing eutrophication of natural waters. The presence of nitrate in foods is mainly due to plants, taking nitrogen from the soil in this ionic form. A contentious health concern related to these agents is the possible formation of cancerogenic nitroamines as a result of the reaction of nitrite with secondary or tertiary amines present in the human body. That is why it is essential to develop analytical methods that allow the simultaneous determination of these compounds in fertilizer industry wastewater. The aim of this work is development of ion chromatographic method for monitoring of sodium, ammonium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, fluoride, chloride, nitrite, sulphate, nitrate and phosphate in fertilizer industry wastewater. Real samples were fertilizer industry wastewater TMG 1 and TMG 2 from Petrokemija d.d., Croatia, fertilizer factory. TMG 1 is fertilizer industry wastewater from following processes: production of NPK fertilizer 1, KAN fertilizer 1, nitric acid 1 and process water preparation 1. TMG 2 is fertilizer industry wastewater from following processes: production of NPK fertilizer 2, KAN fertilizer 2, nitric acid 2, sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid, ammonia, urea and process water preparation 2. Developed method was optimized and better separation within short analysis time was obtained. Optimization was performed by using retention model obtained with artificial neural networks in combination with normalised resolution product criteria function for evaluation of separation, resulting with fast and accurate optimization procedure. By performing validation procedure it is shown that developed ion chromatographic method has suitable performance characteristic for monitoring of fertilizer industry wastewater.

ion chromatography; fertilizer industry; wastewater analysis

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