Detecting Presence of a Chemical

[Laserxenon]

Is there a chemical that can detect the presence of ethylene glycol in a solution? Ideally this would be something that changes color (or other visual indication)if there is greater than some concentration of the ethylene glycol in the solution.

I have done some searching for this, and it appears that the test strips that are available mainly try and show either PH, or concentrations of E.G. I am looking for something that merely shows that there is some presence, perhaps on the order of pp thousand or hundred, not ppm or ppb levels of sensitivity.

Really I am looking for a relative result, not necessarily something that has an absolute measurement. This would ideally be a chemical that could be placed on a test strip, inserted into the fluid and checked to confirm or deny the presence of EG (ie only one "pad" on the test strip)

Thanks!

 

[btrueblood]

Most (all?) automotive grades of ethylene glycol contain a fluorescent tracer dye. It should be fairly straightforward to create calibrated test tubes of known concentration (e.g. 10%, 1%, .1%, etc.), and use them to compare to an unknown sample when all are exposed to a UV light (black light) source.

Beyond that, you might contact Drager to see if they have a vapor detector that is sensitive to glycols. You would then proceed the same way, i.e. at a given temperature of a known sample, pull x mL of air/vapor from above the sample thru the tube. Once you've established a correlation of vapor concentration (as indicated by the tube) to liquid concentration, you could proceed to measure unknown concentrations in samples.

 

[unclesyd]

Wouldn't the test strip that shows concentration work?
If you get any indication it would signify that EG was present.

If it is important enough to warrant a small investment you could look at Refractometers.

 

[Laserxenon]

unclesyd- cost is driving the concentration issue. It is too much information for my application.

Thanks for the advice so far guys!