Ultra-violet absorption spectrophotometry

A nonbarbiturate hypnotic. Glutethimide poisoning causes symptoms similar to those of barbiturate poisoning except that they may be more severe. It can be detected in body fluids by ultra violet absorption spectrophotometry after an initial extraction. 

In modern times, most analyses are performed on an analytical instrument for, e.g., gas chromatography (GC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), ultra-violet/visible (UV) or infrared (IR) spectrophotometry, atomic absorption spectrometry, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), mass spectrometry. Each of these instruments has a limitation on the amount of an analyte that they can detect. This limitation can be expressed as the IDL, which may be defined as the smallest amount of an analyte that can be reliably detected or differentiated from the background on an instrument. 

Ultra-violet and visible spectrophotometry can be effectively used for the control of purification and specification of purity of compounds. If a compound is transparent in the near ultra-violet and the visible regions, the purification is continued until the absorbancy is reduced to a minimum (e < 1). Traces of impurities present in pure transparent organic compounds can be readily detected and estimated, provided the impurities themselves have fairly intense, absorption bands. Before a liquid is used as a spectroscopic solvent, it should be tested for spectrophotometric purity. For example, commercial absolute alcohol usually contains benzene as impurity. The absence of benzene in the Alcohol should be confirmed spectrophoto-metrically by using sufficiently large cells (4 or 10 cm cells), before using the alcohol as a solvent. The presence of carbon disulphide in carbon tetrachloride may be detected by the presence of the disulphide absorption tend at 318 mytt. The detection of the characteristic benzenoid absorption in the spectra of many organic compounds (e.g. diethyl ether, cyclohexene) showed that the bands attributed to these compounds earlier were only due to the contamination by benzene1. 

---