Enhancement of peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence intensity by surfactants and its application to detect detergent

Enhancement of peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence (PO-CL) intensity by a surfactant in the H2O2/bis(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)oxalate (TCPO)/rhodamine B system was described. The effects of 15 surfactants were evaluated by comparing the ratio of a relative CL intensity (RCI) with surfactant to that of the blank in each system. In preliminary study, H2O2/imidazole-HNO3 buffer/TCPO/rhodamine B system was used to study the effects of surfactants on PO-CL intensity. Fourteen surfactants reduced the CL intensity at the 2% concentration, where their relative CL intensities ranged from 0.6 to 93.5%. Some of these phenomena may be caused by a notable change of pH that was occurred by adding the surfactant.Additionally, enhancement of PO-CL intensity was studied by using system (1) H2O2/TCPO/rhodamine B and (2) H2O2/imidazole-HNO3 buffer/TCPO/systems. In the system 1, the favorable enhancement of CL intensity (ranged from 124 to 472%) was observed with 9 surfactants at the 0.5% concentration. This result suggested that several surfactants might play a role as a catalyst in the PO-CL reaction. There was no tendency to enhance CL intensity among the surfactant types. In the system 2, the enhancement of CL intensity was also observed by adding with 11 surfactants, which might be mainly caused by the fluorescent impurities of surfactants used.Furthermore, detection of detergent commercially available was applied by using the system 1.