Evaluation and testing of analytical methods for cyanide species in municipal and industrial contaminated waters.

Total cyanide analysis by distillation is used most commonly to assess cyanide content of water samples. This manual method is robust but slow and provides no information about cyanide speciation, a significant limitation in that cyanide species have substantially different toxicity characteristics. Seven alternative methods for the analysis of cyanide species or groups of species were evaluated in reagent water and five different contaminated water matrices, including five species-specific methods--weak acid dissociable (WAD) cyanide, free cyanide by microdiffusion, available cyanide, automated WAD cyanide by thin film distillation, metal cyanides by ion chromatography--and two automated techniques for total cyanide--total cyanide bythin film distillation and total cyanide by low-power UV digestion.