Nitrogen oxides (NOx) can be formed by a thermal power plant boiler when it works under the combustion of fuel; ammonia is added to the exhaust gas to remove NOx, which reacts with ammonia to give nitrogen and water in a denitrification system. Though the efficiency of the denitrification system can be improved by increasing the amount of ammonia added to the exhaust gas, residual ammonia, which is not used for the denitrification reaction, can leak out of the denitrification system and become the causes of various troubles, including atmospheric pollution.The determination of ammonia in exhaust gas has been carried out by a method consisting of such procedures as sampling the exhaust gas, the dissolution of ammonia in the exhaust gas into an absorption solution (boric acid), and the determination of ammonium ion in the absorption solution by a batchwise absorptiometry. Usually, these procedures have been carried out manually; therefore, the method used to determine ammonia is very tedious and time-consuming. 1 Furthermore, to construct an automatic feed-back system for adding adequate amounts of ammonia to exhaust gas, a rapid and simple determination system for ammonia is now urgently required. In order to automate the on-site determination of ammonia in the absorption solution, a flow injection analysis (FIA) was investigated in this work.Several methods for the determination of ammonia by FIA have been proposed so far; some of the typical representatives are based on a spectrophotometric measurement with Nessler's reagent and phenol-hypochlorite reagents. [2][3][4][5][6] The reactions with phenol-hypochlorite reagents show a relatively high sensitivity and selectivity for ammonia determination. Of the phenolhypochlorite reagents, a salicylic acid-hypochlorite reagent is most promising with respect to the chemical stability of the reagent used and the sensitivity for ammonium ion. As an automated system for the rapid and simple determination of ammonium ion, a spectrophotometric method coupled with FIA seems to be the best choice of the flow-based analysis methods used these days. A spectrophotometric FIA using sodium salicylate was applied to the determination of ammonia in the exhaust gas of a thermal power plant. 6 In a method with salicylic acid and hypochlorite, 4-6 nitroprusside has been used as a catalyst. The nitroprusside is a very useful reagent for a sensitivity enhancement of ammonia determination. However, it is a toxic substance, and should be replaced by a non-toxic or less-toxic substance.In this work, some metal ions were examined as a catalyst, and the concentrations of the reagents used for the ammonia coloration reaction, reaction conditions and flow conditions were examined in detail for improving the sensitivity of ammonia determination without using nitroprusside. The established FIA method was found to be applicable to the exhaust gas of a thermal power plant. Co., Inc. Technical Research Center, Kagamiyama,, Japan **Chuden Kankyo Technos Co., Ltd., Kagamiyama,, Japan ***Department of...