Determination of deuterium oxide content in water based on luminescence quenching

J Kucera; P Lubal; S Lis; P Taborsky

doi:10.1016/j.talanta.2018.03.016

Determination of deuterium oxide content in water based on luminescence quenching

Talanta. 2018 Jul 1:184:364-368. doi: 10.1016/j.talanta.2018.03.016. Epub 2018 Mar 13.

Authors

J Kucera¹, P Lubal¹, S Lis², P Taborsky¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Kotlarska 2, Brno 61137, Czech Republic.
² Department of Rare Earths, Faculty of Chemistry, Adam Mickiewicz University, Umultowska 89b, 61-614 Poznan, Poland.

PMID: 29674055
DOI: 10.1016/j.talanta.2018.03.016

Abstract

Water molecules (H₂O) often reduce luminescence lifetimes of various luminescence probes. The change of lifetime is usually caused by dynamic luminescence quenching induced by O-H oscillators which effectively take away energy from excited molecule. The process can be described by Stern-Volmer equation. We have studied selected luminescence systems where it is possible to detect considerable changes of lifetime in presence/absence of H₂O and D₂O in this work for analytical purposes. We have tested both, inorganic (Ln³⁺) and organic compounds using three different instrumentation in order to find the largest change between τ_H and τ_D. The Ln³⁺ containing systems have shown considerable increase/decrease of lifetimes in the presence/absence of D₂O (Eu³⁺: τ_D/τ_H = 34.5) whereas organic systems gave significantly lower values of τ_D/τ_H (coumarin 123 lifetime ratio, τ_D/τ_H = 1.94). The calculated LOD varied from 0.04 mol l^-1 (samarium nitrate) to 6.55 mol l^-1 (riboflavin).

Keywords: Deuterium oxide determination; Ln(III) luminescence; Luminescence quenching; Organic compounds luminescence; Time-Resolved Luminescence Spectroscopy.