Water soluble iron tetrasulfophthalocyanine for quantification and removal of dibutylamine from water

Abstract

Amines are being widely used in industrial, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Yet, few studies involve simple inexpensive methods to determine the presence or concentrations of these compounds in surface water. Many molecular probes used for this purpose are not water soluble. Tetrasulfophthalocyanines are water soluble and capable of forming complexes through electron charge transfer. This means UV-Vis absorbance changes may be useful for quantifying amines in solution. To achieve this, Iron(II) tetrasulfophthalocyanine's (FeTSPc) was evaluated to both quantify dibutylamine (DBA) in water and remove DBA when supported on anion exchange resin. The UV-Vis absorbance spectrum of FeTSPc was shown to result in a shoulder at 667 nm due to forming a complex with DBA. The absorbance difference between the shoulder and that of pure FeTSPc in water was used to quantify the amount of DBA present. The calibration was found to be logarithmic with a detection limit of 55 ppm, which is higher than instrumental methods. The hallmark of this effort found that one gram total of anion exchange resin with bound FeTSPc (2.33 µmol/g of resin) was capable of removing 0.02 g of dibutylamine from 50 mL of water (400 ppm). This was verified by UV-Vis absorbance and 1H-NMR indicating this is a new remediation method for treating amines in water.

Keywords

• Supported phthalocyanine
• Molecular probe
• Detection limit
• Anion exchange resin
• Remediation of amines