Dielectric Barrier Discharge-vapor Generation-atomic Fluorescence Spectrometry For The Detection Of Trace Mercury

As one of the toxic heavy metal species, mercury has caused severe environmental pollution and irreversible harm to human beings, thus it is of vital significance to develop a rapid and simple detection method for the determination of trace mercury in environmental samples. While environmental samples generally have complex matrix, which is unfavorable for the detection. Therefore it is necessary to develop effective sample pretreatment method and sample introduction techniques, to separate the analyte from sample matrix effectively, and then achieve accurate detection results.A new online vapor generation technology, named dielectric barrier discharge vapor generation (DBD-VG) is adopted in the present study, coupled with atomic fluorescence spectrometry(AFS), is hope to develop a novel, fast and simple approach to detect inorganic mercury. DBD-VG features low cost, high selectivity and excellent environmental friendliness. The newly designed tubular DBD, which replaced the conventional reaction coil, acts as an active particle source as well as a part of flow channels in the atomic fluorescence spectrometry system. Formic acid used as DBD stabilizer to ensure the effective vapor generation. The analysis speed was improved greatly due to the avoidance of using sodium borohydride or stannous chloride.With a sample volume of200μL, a detection limit of0.026μg/L is achieved for this DBD-VG-AFS system, along with a precision of4.5%at the level of4μg/L. The developed method has been applied to the detection of mercury in certified reference material (GBW(E)080392) and three water samples. The obtained results agreed well with the certified value and satisfactory spiking recoveries were obtained for real-world water samples.