Spectrophotometric Determination of Acrylamide Polymers by Flow Injection Analysis

SUMMARY Flow injection analysis has been applied to the analysis of acrylamide polymers to provide an automated determination at the rate of 90 samples/hour. The method is suitable for use with acrylamide polymer samples obtained from enhanced oil recovery operations, given a constant degree of polymer hydrolysis. An N-bromo amide is formed, which subsequently oxidizes iodide to iodine. Iodine is measured spectrophotometrically as the starch-triiodide complex. The method is applicable in the range of 0.5 to 75 mg/L polyacrylamide. Relative standard deviation of less than 1.5% was obtained. Detection limit (S/N=3) is 0.2 mg/L. The problems of a non-zero intercept and surfactant interference, which occur in the manual starch-triiodide method, were corrected.