Although these approaches can partly overcome the mentioned drawbacks occurred in the atomic spectrometric techniques, most of them remain several limitations including serious interferences from similar metal ions, insufficient sensitivity (limit of detection, LOD > 100 nmol -1) and the need of carefully designed and expensive DNA probes. Significant efforts have been devoted to develop portable, inexpensive and accurate methods for field analysis of mercury, which include colorimetric or fluorescent sensor systems. Although these methods can meet the requirement of mercury routine analysis, the used instrumentations are large, expensive, gas and power consuming and not suitable for real-time field analysis of mercury. In order to monitor mercury emission, a variety of methods have been developed for the determination of mercury including electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (ET-AAS), cold vapor generation atomic absorption spectrometry/atomic fluorescence spectrometry (CVG-AAS/AFS) and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry/mass spectrometry (ICP-OES/MS).
In October 2013, governments from 92 countries signed the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Minamata Convention on mercury to prevent from increasing mercury emission from the anthropogenic activities. Mercury contamination poses serious threats to public health globally because of its long distance transportation, persistent toxic and bio-accumulative characteristics. Mercury Real time field analysis Microplasma Optical emission spectrometry Cold vapor generation Miniaturization 1. Method validation was demonstrated by analysis of a certified reference material of water sample and three real water samples with good spike recoveries (88-102%). Compared to the conventional microplasma optical emission spectrometry used for mercury analysis, this system not only retains the good limit of detection amenable to the determination of mercury in real samples, but also reduces power consumption, eliminates the generation of hydrogen and avoids the use of toxic or unstable reductant. Limits of detection of 0.20 μg L -1 and 2.6 μg L -1 were obtained for the proposed system using or not using formic acid, respectively. Mercury cold vapor was generated when standard or sample solutions with or without formic acid were introduced to the reactor to form thin film liquid and exposed to microplasma irradiation and subsequently separated from the liquid phase for transport to the microplasma and detection of its atomic emission. Abstract: An environmentally friendly, low power consuming, sensitive and compact mercury analyzer was developed for the determination of mercury in water samples by integrating a thin film dielectric barrier discharge induced cold vapor reactor and a dielectric barrier discharge optical emission spectrometer into a small polymethyl methacrylate plate (10.5 cm length×8.0 cm width×1.2 cm height).
0 kommentar(er)
