Super serpentine reactors in SIA. A comparative response and precision study

Dispersion and zone overlapping play a very important role in SIA. Its cont rol is the key to both the development of a methodology and its optimizatio n. A tiron-iron (III) complex was used to investigate the influence super S erpentine reactors have on these two parameters using sensitivity and preci sion as the two measurement criteria with a spectrophotometer as detector. The SIA manifold is simple and the complexation reaction between tiron and iron (III) is fast enough such that dispersion and zone overlapping are the major role players contributing to the concentration gradient between the sample and reagent. Six different reactor types - a straight tube, a helica lly coiled tube and four super Serpentines I, II, III, and IV of four diffe rent lengths with an i.d. of 0.76 mm - were compared.