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I have a sample of an iodine solution that has been dyed brown to mask the amount of iodine within.

I have added activated carbon to 100 mL of the sample and mixed for 3 hours to remove the iodine from the solution but now I'm having trouble recovering the iodine back into solution.

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  • $\begingroup$ What is the solution? $\endgroup$
    – airhuff
    Feb 21, 2017 at 11:29
  • $\begingroup$ An iodine teat dip, so i'm not entirely sure if its going to be PVP iodine or not $\endgroup$
    – Marc Mullin
    Feb 21, 2017 at 11:38
  • $\begingroup$ I was going to try addition of an organic solvent and giving it some gentle heat for 30 or so minutes $\endgroup$
    – Marc Mullin
    Feb 21, 2017 at 11:40
  • $\begingroup$ That would be my best guess too. I don't know what kind of equipment you have, but you could reflux or even distill it off if you were set up to do so. $\endgroup$
    – airhuff
    Feb 21, 2017 at 11:48
  • $\begingroup$ I'll give it a go this afternoon and let you know how it goes :) $\endgroup$
    – Marc Mullin
    Feb 21, 2017 at 11:49

1 Answer 1

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Based on Recovery of Iodine with Activated Carbon from Dilute Aqueous Solutions,Petrochemical Center of Excellence, Department of Chemical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, No.424, Hafez Ave., Tehran, Iran , you should get good recovery of your iodine by heating in a solution of NaOH. According to the paper:

The optimal desorption conditions obtained by the software are as follows: temperature of NaOH solution: $\mathrm{50^oC}$, concentration of NaOH solution: 0.5 % and agitation speed: 300rpm. Desorption experiments under these optimal conditions showed 98.9% desorption. The Taguchi design software results also showed that in the desorption section, the contributions of each factor on desorption percentage are as follows: concentration of NaOH solution (55%), temperature of NaOH solution (39.4%) and agitation speed (4.6%).
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the necessary time for equilibrium desorption is obtained as 6h.

The paper does not discuss the algorithms used to calculate the relative importance of the different parameters, but obviously temperature and NaOH concentration are the important factors to getting such good recovery.

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  • $\begingroup$ I saw this paper and did try the NaOH method but I don't think I reacted for long enough. I'll give it another go and leave it spinning for 4-5 hours. Thank you :) $\endgroup$
    – Marc Mullin
    Mar 7, 2017 at 9:32
  • $\begingroup$ I hope it works, I've got my fingers crossed! $\endgroup$
    – airhuff
    Mar 7, 2017 at 19:37

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