UV–vis spectroscopic detection of formaldehyde and its analogs: A convenient and sensitive methodology

Formaldehyde is deemed to be an indispensable industrial product that has been widely applied in manufacture of resins, drugs, building materials, etc. It has been widely accepted that, nevertheless, residual formaldehyde will cause pathogen reactions, even leading to cancers like leukemia. Thus, a facile and efficient approach has been designed to achieve the determination of formaldehyde by ultraviolet and visible (UV–vis) spectrophotometry in liquid media. In detail, O-(carboxymethyl) hydroxylamine (C2H5NO3·0.5HCl) is chosen as the detection reagent for the specific recognition of formaldehyde on account of its unique aminooxy (-O-NH2) which can react with formaldehyde to form oxime bonds (O-NCH2), accompanied with the only by-product of H2O. Likewise, this simple and sensitive detection approach based on the chemical detection reagent C2H5NO3·0.5HCl can also be applied to the determination of other aldehyde homologs with carbonyl groups including acetaldehyde, acetone, benzaldehyde, 1, 4-phthalaldehyde. As a result, all the UV absorbances of analytes display remarkable linear detection relationships. The limits of detection (LOD) and limits of quantitation (LOQ) values are in the range of 0.03–1.16 ppm and 0.03–5.81 ppm respectively, with RSDs of 3.27–3.75 %, evidencing the feasibility of our method to determine formaldehyde and its homologs by UV–vis spectrophotometry and auspicious prospects of practical applications.