An Automated Procedure for the Determination of Ammonia in Tobacco

A procedure for the automated determination of ammonia in tobacco has been developed. Ammonia is extracted from the ground tobacco sample with water and is determined with a Technicon Auto Analyser system which employs separation of the ammonia through volatilization followed by colourimetry using the phenate-hypochlorite reaction. The procedure has been applied to a variety of tobaccos containing from 0.02 to 0.5 % ammonia with an overall relative standard deviation of 2 %. The accuracy of the procedure as judged by recovery tests and by comparison to a manual distillation method is considered adequate