A novel method for the determination of the degree of deacetylation of chitosan by coulometric titration

A novel method to determine the degree of deacetylation of chitosan is described. In this method, the coulometric titrant OH− is generated by the electrolysis of water. The OH− reacted with the residual hydrochloric acid in chitosan solution and the degree of deacetylation was obtained by Faraday's law. The optimized experimental parameters in this study were 1.0 mol/L KCl as supporting electrolyte, 15.00 mA as the intensity of constant current, composite glass electrode as indicating electrode couples, double platinum generated electrode-platinum wire auxiliary electrode as working electrode pairs, pH 3.80 as the titration end-point. The degree of deacetylation in the four samples, which varied from 70 to 95% were measured. The results were similar to those from 1H NMR and the standard deviations were lower than 0.5%. With merit of simplicity, convenience, quickness, high accuracy and precision, automatic detection of titration end-point and low-cost, the proposed method will be very useful in the industrial production.