Inspite of substantial time and solvent required, traditional extraction techniques in analytical laboratory shows the biggest bottlenecks and source of errors that occur during sample preparation. Difficulties encountered includes long duration per sample, large amount of solvent, maximum exposure of expensive hazardous solvents in the environment and difficult labor intensive. To bring this change stage of laboratory workflow the technique of Accelerated Solvent Extraction (ASE) is used to par with the powerful analytical techniques that exist today. ASE is an automated technique specialized in extraction of solid and semi-solid samples using liquid solvents at temperature above their normal boiling points. This technique is designed to reduce time and solvent required to achieve faster extraction. The proposed work is to extract copper using organodithiophosphinic acid reagent 2,4,4-bis trimethylpentyldithiophosphinic acid (Cyanex 301) in acidic medium using ASE. Copper mixed with Ottawa adsorbent were transferred to 33ml Zirconium extraction cell. Cyanex 301 in toluene used as an extracting agent were passed into extraction cell. It formed a complex with copper in acidic medium. During the extraction process ASE operational variables such as temperature, pressure, static time, purge time and extraction cycle were optimised to achieve efficient extractions. Extracts were collected and quantitatively evaluated in UV-Visible Spectrophotometer. ASE method has significantly reduced both sample preparation time and the amount of organic solvent used as compared to other traditional methods. The proposed method has been successfully applied to recover metal in real samples.
