Novel curcumin–based method of fluoride determination – the PAGIKAND method

Abstract

Fluoride concentrations above and below certain limits are deleterious to human health, having been implicated in diseases such as fluorosis, arthritis, caries, cancers etc. Better methods of its qualitative and quantitative determination are therefore necessary. A novel, less toxic and more environmentally friendly analytical method for determination of fluorides, named the PAGIKAND method, is proposed, based on the complex formation capability of diferuloylmethane with zirconium. Absorbance of the complex at its absorption maximum of 465 nm was found to decrease (up to 94.69%) with increase in fluoride concentration in solution (up to 10 mg F- L-1). The optimum pH for the required complex formation was determined to be 8.5, and the Detection Limit (LOD) for the proposed method was calculated to be 1.3 x 10-6 mol L-1. The proposed method was applied to the analysis of fluorides in river water and T .
test was used to compare contents of fluorides determined using a known method (SPADNS) with those determined using the new method. The mean fluoride concentration for the new method was found to be 0.1232}0.030 mg L-1 while that of the SPADNS method was 0.1257}0.289 mg L-1. At 95% confidence interval (p = 0.05) and 18 degrees of freedom, with critical value of 2.10, the „ texp„  was 1.987. This indicates there is no significant difference between the results obtained from the known method (SPADNS) and that obtained from the proposed method, since „ texp„  < tcritical.

KEYWORDS: Novel Method, Fluoride, Spectrometry, Curcumin, Diferuloylmethane