Abstract
A novel spectrophotometric method was developed for the determination of aliphatic thiols. The method was based on the stoichiometric redox reaction between aliphatic thiol and a copper(II) complex with 1, 10-phenanthroline in dimethyl sulfoxide to form an intensely colored copper(I) complex, which had a molar absorptivity of 7000dm3 mol-1 cm-1 at 444nm. The calibration curves for five aliphatic thiols of carbon numbers 1-8 had the same slope over the range from the detection limit of 5.0×10-6 to 1.5×10-4mol dm-3. The relative standard deviation of five successive experiments was 2.0% at 8.6×10-5mol dm-3 of 1-butanethiol. The method was applied to the determination of methanethiol in gas samples.
