Determination of Phosphorus in Waste Water by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectrometry

摘要

Under the EPA regulations, waste water should not contain more than 5-6mg/L of total phosphorus before it is discharged into a public sewer system. The conventional methods for determining phosphorous in waste are time consuming and also require pretreatment of samples to convert all the phosphorous to the orth-phosphate form for analysis. Inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometric method (ICP-AES) has been successfully used to determine phosphorus in waste. This method is fast, accurate and does not require sample pretreatment prior to analysis.