Flow-Injection Responses of Diffusion Processes and Chemical Reactions

The technique of Flow-injection Analysis (FIA), now aged 25 years, offers unique analytical methods that are fast, reliable and consuming an absolute minimum of chemicals. These advantages together with its inherent feasibility for automation warrant the future applications of FIA as an attractive tool of automated analytical chemistry.

The need for an even lower consumption of chemicals and for computer analysis has motivated a study of the FIA peak itself, that is, a theoretical model was developed, that provides detailed knowledge of the FIA profile. It was shown that the flow in a FIA manifold may be characterised by a diffusion coefficient that depends on flow rate, denoted as the kinematic diffusion coefficient.

The description was applied to systems involving species of chromium, both in the case of simple diffusion and in the case of chemical reactions. It is suggested that it may be used in the resolution of FIA profiles to obtain information about the content of interference’s, in the study of chemical reaction kinetics and to measure absolute concentrations within the FIA-detector cell.