[Thegreatironquestion]

Ok this is a weird one,

TL;DR: need to find total iron of an energy drink what is the best way to separate the iron from solution?

 I work at a water testing facility, usually we get drinking water and test it for all sorts of things. One analite I see commonly is total iron, this is done using the Ironferrover method in which I get all the iron into soluble ferrous iron which reacts with 1-10 phenanthroline indicator in the reagent packet to form an orange color in proportion to the iron concentration.

This is super easy just pour reagent packet in, wait a few minutes and read, sometimes dilute if sample reads higher than the device can handle.


Well today I had a person walk in and ask for us to tell them how much iron is in their energy drink. They had a reasonable answer to why they needed this data and my boss said sure we will give it a try.


Boss then asked how we should go about doing this.

I HAVE NO IDEA.

First off the energy drink is colored which makes measuring something via color difficult if I dilute to the point the color is not noticable my error for the machine will be larger than the results I get.

Second there are tons of random large organic molecules and other s#*$ in there that I have zero ability to predict how it would react with all of my reagents.

My other coworker suggested gravimetric analysis

We also have an IC machine but to run it through there we would need to remove all the organic compounds from solution.