Spectrophotometric and high performance liquid chromatographic methods for sensitive determination of bisphenol A

•We report new methods for the determination of bisphenol A.•A mechanism for the spectrophotometric method has been proposed.•Bisphenol A could be analyzed with speed, good precision and accuracy.•These reported methods have been successfully applied to practical samples.

A new spectrophotometric method for the determination of trace amounts of bisphenol A based on a diazotization-coupling reaction was developed. In acidic solution, clenbuterol was first diazotized with sodium nitrite, then coupled with bisphenol A to from an azo-compound [I] in NH3–NH4Cl buffer, which shows a maximum absorption at 410 nm. The effects of the amount of sodium nitrite, diazo reaction time, the amount of clenbuterol, coupling reaction time and coupling reaction temperature have been examined. Under the optional conditions, the determination of the linear range of bisphenol A is 0.24–8.4 μg/mL, correlation coefficient is 0.9905 and detection limit of this method is 0.15 μg/mL. The spectrophotometric method is simple, rapid, high sensitivity with better accuracy. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) technique combined with this new spectrophotometric method has been also developed for the measurement of bisphenol A. The analysis was achieved on a C18 column using water and methanol as a mobile phase and the detection was done spectrophotometrically at 410 nm. These reported methods were applied to the determination of bisphenol A in hot water in contact with commercially available table-water bottle samples.

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