Determination of Trace Bromate in Drinking Water with High Chloride Matrix by Cyclic Ion Chromatography

An ion chromatography (IC) system with switching recycling column was developed for the determination of bromate in drinking water with high chloride content. The system included a pump, two switching valves, guard column and analytical column, suppressor and a conductivity detector. In this method, the single eluent was used for both online collection and matrix elimination, and bromate was eluted from the concentrator column to the analytical column circularly. Under the optimized separation conditions, the method showed good linearity (r = 0.9995) in the range of 1–100 μg/L and repeatability (RSD ≤ 4.80%, n = 6). The limit of detection was 0.2 μg/L (S/N = 3) with 1000 μL sample volume injections. The method was applied to analysis of drinking and tap waters, and satisfactory recoveries of spiked samples between 96.8% and 108.7% were obtained. The result showed that the recycling column-switching system can be useful for the determination of traces of bromate in high-chloride samples, which is required in production of the drinking water and quality control of the final product.