Development of Spectrophotometric Method for the Determination of Copper(II) in Standard Alloy and Soil Samples Using 3-AcetylpyridineThiosemicarbazone (3-APT)

A highly sensitive spectrophotometric method has been described for the determination of copper (II) using 3acetylpyridine thiosemicarbazone (3-APT) as an analytical reagent. Copper (II) forms a light yellow colored complex at a pH range 6.0 – 8.0. The Cu (II)–3-APT complex shows maximum absorbance at 365 nm with a molar absorptivity and Sandell’s sensitivity of the complex species being 3.33 × 10 4 L mol -1 cm -1 and 2.0 × 10 -3 μg/cm 2 , respectively. The system obeyed Beer’s law in the concentration range of 0.076-0.915 μg/ml of copper (II), with an excellent linearity and a correlation coefficient of 0.999. The detection limited of the method is 0.0425μg/ml. The repeatability of the method was checked by finding the relative standard deviation. The developed spectrophotometric method was successfully applied for the determination of copper (II) when present alone or in the presence of diverse ions which are usually associated with copper (II) in soil and various standard alloy samples have been successfully tested and the results were fairly comparable with those obtained from the atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) measurements. © 2013 Universal Research Publications. All rights reserved