Objective To establish a method for determination of anionic surfactant in water by continuous flowing analyser of SKALARSan++.

Method Clean water sample was directly collected and waste water was pre-treated by filtration or ultrasonic treatment, then anionic surfactant in water was determined by continuous flowing analyser.

Results At concentrations of (0.050~0.500) mg/L, the linear relationship was good and the correlation coefficient for anionic surfactant was 0.9991;the detection limit of anionic surfactant was 4.1 mg/L; the additive recovery rates of the samples were 95%~110%; the relative standard deviations were less than 6%.The standard substance of an ionic surfactant in water was analyzed, and the results were in the reference range of the standard value.

Conclusions The method was proved to be simple, rapid, accurate and reliable and could applied for the determination of anionic surfactant in water.In addition, the method was less reagent consumption and less harm to the operator and could applied to rapid analysis of large quantities of samples.The article demonstrates some problems that occurred in the determinations also.