A single pump cycling-column-switching technique coupled with homemade high exchange capacity columns for the determination of iodate in iodized edible salt by ion chromatography with UV detection

A single pump cycling-column-switching technique has been developed for the iodate analysis in edible salt. Homemade high exchange capacity columns were adopted for the separation of iodate and chloride. Iodate could be retained and concentrated in a homemade concentrator column after eluents passing through the suppressor. With UV detection, iodate exhibited satisfactory linearity in the range of 0.1–10.0 mg/L with a correlation coefficient of 0.9996. The detection limit (LOD) was 45.53 μg/L, based on the signal-to-noise ratio of 3 (S/N = 3) and a 100 μL injection volume. Relative standard deviations (RSDs) for retention time, peak area and peak height were all less than 2.1%. Recoveries of added iodate were in the range of 98.4–101.6% for the spiked samples. The quantitative determination of iodate in edible salt was accomplished by this column-switching technique, without any pretreatment and interference. The results on six samples were statistically compared with results determined by conventional titrimetric method.