[tehanur]

Hi!

Maybe someone here can help me with a little problem we have with phenol in tap water.
We are developing a method for the determination of phenol in waters and it worked
quite well until we started to make recovery studies in tap waters.

We spiked tap water from different places with phenol, derivatised, extracted and
analysed by GC-MS. To our very surprise we didn't find any phenol, after several
experiments we finally found out why. For some reason the phenol in tap water was
brominated completely, we found mono-, di- and tribromofenols.

The tap water contains some bromine, but we thought only Br2 can brominate phenol.

Any ideas how this could happen and how to avoid it?

[Borek]

Is the water chlorinated?

[tehanur]

Yes, the water is chlorinated.

[Borek]

So if it is chlorinated and cotains Br^-... High School chemistry at work?