Ethanol Extract of Areca Nut (Areca catechu L.) as a Complexing Agent to Determinate Fe(III) in Water Media

A complexing agent is very critical in the analysis of metal ions with spectrophotometry Uv-Vis method. The most widely used complexing agents are un-environmental and expensive industrial products. This work employed the ethanol extract of the areca nut as a complexing agent to determine the Fe(III) in water media, which is the most likely to pollute the environment. We found that the optimum reaction between areca nut extract with Fe(III) occurred at pH 5 and in the ratio of 21.6 mg/L Fe(III): 10 mg/L of extract. This mixture reached the highest absorbance at around 30 minutes. The spectrometric and digital image methods show the linear relation between Fe(III) concentration and absorbance with a correlation coefficient of 0.998 and 0.997 (for the green component), respectively. However, the spectrometric method shows more comparable performance parameters with the use of KSCN as a complexing agent than the digital image method. This method was also applied to analyse Fe(III) in the real water sample, and all samples' recoveries were acceptable.