engleski

Digital technology in quantitative colorimetric analysis

Increasing levels of pollution due to industrial growth is considered one of the biggest health and environmental issues. With the recent industrial growth and technological development, experts expect growth to continue even more strongly in the next several years. For that reason, it is necessary to develop cheap, fast and reliable methods for determination pollutants in water, air and soil. Colorimetric methods meet the criteria [1]. Development of digital technology could provide adequate solution to the improvement of colorimetric methods. The concentration of analyte can be determined by measuring the intensity of colour. For that purpose, PC application was developed. It was based on RGB additive model of colours which is usually used for digital images processing. Combination of RGB values gives a wide spectrum of different colours which can be used for colorimetric determination [2]. Application was developed in Visual Basic [3] programming language. Combination of the application and standard colorimetric methods gives effective solution for measuring the concentrations of several chemical analytes. The pictures of the samples were taken with digital camera. Special environment and algorithm was developed to minimize influence of external factors. The calibration curve was constructed from the measurement values showing high linearity. The main aim was to develop simple, cheap, quick and in the end effective application for concentration determination of some chemical analytes. The application was tested on standard colorimetric method for determination of phosphates, and also on aqueous solutions of potassium permanganate. In both cases, high linearity was obtained from which was possible to determine the concentration very precisely.

PC application ; colorimetry ; RGB ; digital camera

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