Analyze Cyanide Quickly, and Accurately.
Stop wasting time distilling samples and fill your wallet with cash!


“Finally an amazingly simple way to measure cyanide in your laboratory and double or triple profits immediately.”

Are you tired of wasting time and spending money on time-consuming, inaccurate, distillation bottlenecks?

How about sample throughput? Are you sick of your inability to expand because of the extra work from increasing your workload?

Are your clients getting ahead of you, or are they charging less than you and effectively stealing your business because you can’t keep up?

The secret that will save you money is the OI CNSolution. Its unique capability of analyzing for all forms of cyanide without time consuming and costly distillations eliminates distillation and minimizes interferences producing more reliable results and allowing faster turn around times.



Even if Distillation is required, Gas diffusion – amperometry is superior.
The colorimetric methods used in most laboratories require determining total cyanide after distillation by EPA 335.4 or SM4500. The OI CNSolution has been proven more accurate than colorimetric methods.

The low cost of operating the Gas Diffusion - Amperometric FIA instruments allows dischargers to frequently monitor their processes making it possible to quickly detect problems before they can cause serious ecological damage. Routine daily, or even hourly, testing can be realistically implemented so that exact cyanide discharge levels can be accurately known.

The OI CNSolution saves you time.

Aquatic Free Cyanide
Cyanide is about 1000 times more toxic to aquatic life than it is to humans. For this reason, it is important that free cyanide be measured in fragile aqueous environments. Free Cyanide is defined as the amount of HCN that is liberated from a solution at pH 6.0, and should only measure cyanide present in solution as HCN or as CN-.
The OI CNSolution accurately measures aquatic free cyanide by ASTM D7237-06.

The only automated method for free cyanide!


Simple Cyanide Compounds
Simple Cyanides are the readily soluble salts of cyanide such as sodium, potassium, and calcium and along with free cyanide are the only cyanide complexes likely to be present in Drinking Water.
The OI CNSolution accurately measures free cyanide in drinking water by OIA1677-DW or ASTM D6888-04. These flow injection methods are the only interference free approved methods for the determination of cyanide in drinking water that do not require time consuming and expensive preliminary distillations.

Time – consuming distillation is not required!


The OI CNSolution may also be used to accurately measure simple cyanide in milk, assorted beverages, and food extracts.

No distillation required!




Weak and Moderately Strong Metal-Cyanide Complexes
Weak to moderately strong metal-cyanide complexes are compounds that could readily release hydrogen cyanide gas from an acid. Weak Acid Dissociable (WAD), Cyanide Amenable to Chlorination (CATC), and Ligand Exchange methods have been devised in an effort to quantify these complexes.

Do you consistently get false positives or false negatives?
It’s not your fault it’s the methods fault!
CATC and WAD methods, and all distillation colorimetric methods for cyanide are proven inaccurate!

Simply changing your method will solve everything!





The OI CNSolution accurately measures Available Cyanide in wastewater by OIA1677 or ASTM D6888-04, and in ore processing and related metallurgical materials. Gas-diffusion Amperometric flow injection methods are the only interference free approved methods for the determination of available cyanide in wastewater that do not require time consuming and expensive preliminary distillations.

CATC and WAD Cyanide without distillation!
Get results within minutes instead of hours or days!
Increase Capacity up to hundreds of samples per shift!
Dramatically Increase Profits!











Strong Metal - Cyanide Complexes
Commonly known as "total" cyanide and defined by the USEPA as cyanide ion and complexes converted to hydrogen cyanide gas by reflux distillation in the presence of strong acid and the magnesium ion. Methods for the analysis of "total cyanide" include ferrous and ferric complexes along with all other previously mentioned forms. Thiocyanate or cyanate ions are not included.
Colorimetric post distillation OI CNSolution precisely measures cyanide in distilled samples according to EPA 335.4. This flow analysis method is currently the only approved automated, commercially available method for the determination of total cyanide in wastewater samples.

EPA 335.4 and SM 4500 methods are inaccurate!

Years of testing and experiments have demonstrated that distillation and colorimetric methods of cyanide analysis do not accurately yield quantitative, or even qualitative, results in samples with complex matrices.

It has been shown that sulfide interferes significantly. Abundant literature references of efforts to minimize sulfide interference have been found to be ineffective.


The only accurate way to determine post - distillation total cyanide in sulfide bearing samples is to use the OI CNSolution in accordance with ASTM D7284-08.


Distillation is time-consuming and introduces error.

Even with post distillation Gas-Diffusion Amperometric Flow Injection Analysis it is not possible to determine total cyanide in complex samples that contain combinations of, or all of, the following ions; thiosulfate, sulfite, nitrate, nitrite, thiocyanate, and peroxide. The US 40CFR mentions that it is not possible to determine cyanide after distillation from samples containing thiosulfate or sulfite.

Eliminating distillation improves results!









The only method that determines total cyanide in these complex matrices is the Non-distillation OI CNSolution. The UV irradiation gas-diffusion amperometry method uses low temperature, low strength UV technology to selectively disassociate cyanide ions from metal complexes while not allowing the simultaneous destruction or creation of cyanide that is common with high heat distillations.
The OI CNSolution accurately determines true total cyanide rapidly and without distillation.







Total Cyanide Results in minutes, not hours or even days!

Dramatically increase profits – no unnecessary labor costs.
Quit waiting around and decrease TAT

Sulfate and the CFR

The EPA has recently published a new Table of approved methods that removes most turbidimetric sulfate methods from the list. This is actually good being that IC is likely the best way to determine sulfate, however, it's quite bad for the thousands of people out there that have found themselves without a method. ASTM D516-02 is your resort as it is equal to the EPA method.

The good thing about this latest publication is that the EPA finally allows laboratory personnel to use their brains and modify methods to get better results. More on this later.

Ammonia

There is a method much simpler than EPA 350.1 for the determination of ammonia that works quite well on Discrete Analyzers. It is still based on the Berthelot reaction but combines some reagents reducing the number of reagents from four to two. It is faster, and simpler to use plus it doesn't smell as bad. Will it ever be approved?

Ammonia Methods and the Silly EPA

Methods of analysis for ammonia in soil and water extracts rely, for the most part, on reactions that date bak two centuries. Not that it is bad 'cause if something works it works, but you'd think that in this day of technology it would be allowed by our government to at least take advantage of some new things. Not that we don't take advantage of the instruments that are available since 1830, but we seem stuck to the technology that was established in the Nixon administration. Hello EPA , there is more than one way to skin a cat.

The method most used by environmental labs for the determination of ammonia is EPA method 350.1 based on the Berthelot reaction. In this method, ammonia is converted to chloramine that reacts with phenol under basic conditions to create an intensely blue indophenol dye that's color is directly proportional to the ammonia concentration. The reagents are added together using a segmented flow analyzer (SFA), and mor recently Flow Injection Analyzers (FIA).

Nowadays we have a new analyzer on the scene that is being marketed as a Discrete Analyzer. Where the silliness begins is in the way and order reagents are added because our EPA insists that these Discrete Analyzers duplicate the action of the flow analyzers. The problem is that discrete analyzers are not flow analyzers. The best way to bring about the berthelot reaction is not neccessarily equally and independent of the type of analyzer.

The Analysis of Things

So often it is expected that a single magical method provided by an instrument manufacturer is going to be the catch all fix to solve all problems. It's funny that for the most part the development done at the manufacturing facility is done by a non-user of the method that does not have a complete grasp of the difficulties that are confronting the average user. Thus, the method is developed on known samples of known interferences and does not, nor cannot, take into account the thousands and thousands of alternate possibilities that the method will later have to deal with.

The laboratory manager, purchasing this method/instrument makes the assumption that the manufacturer is the expert that he is not and relies on this save all method/device assuming all is well in his application. The manager assumes he will not have to think, his lab rats will not have to think, because afterall, someone else did all the thinking for them.

The Discrete Analyzer

I will be at Pittcon next week standing around in a booth trying to convince people they need to buy our discrete and flow analyzers. Snazzy machines, these are, but they are not the simplistic device that they are portrayed to be. The common misconception is that prestored methods are capable of handling any sample matrix. Again, taking the chemistry out of chemistry. Years ago, like in the 30's. an article called "Chemical Analysis of Things the Way they Are" in this article Hilldebrand (I think it was) discusses his fear that so called rapid chemical determinations (for they are not true analysis) will replace analysis, and the level of skill of the analyst will go down. In this article he discusses the fallacy of assuming that a rapid method designed for one matrix can be applied to all samples with mindless abandon. Thus, we have the environmental testing industry. Our good government has rammed down the throats of the laboratory the legal requirement to analyze contaminants by approved methods regardless of their applicability to the measurement at hand. The typical analyst knows nothing of chemistry, albiet he thinks he does, as he applies untested methods to untested matrices. The consumer (industry) is forced to accept results even if they are wrong, and can be proven wrong, because they are obtained from analysis by approved methods. Thus the cycle continues.

Automated Wet Chemistry

I know that I am in a narrow field of employment. There are not too many applications in the world, and not too many people understand it. It is difficult to remain in employment in an environment where the supervisors and upper level management do not understand what it is you do and so, therefore, cannot discern truth from un truth. It is easy for them to be fooled by those who talk big and cannot deliver, leaving those who understand the reality of the situation out of the loop. With more than 20 years experience in laboratory analysis, I see myself without the influence that I should have while others who do not have the knowledge are perceived as experts for whatever reason. There are so few of us out there who actually pretend to understand what it is we do, and we are recognized by our willingness to admit we cannot understand it all. So here I sit feeling trapped and doomed.