Continuation of investigation of effect of O2 in plasma gas on parameters of nitrogen microwave-induced plasma optical emission spectrometry

Abstract

We studied the effect of O2 content in the range up to 80% in plasma gas on the plasma characteristics, the analyte signal and the intensity of the molecular species in the nitrogen microwave-induced plasma (MIP). The plasma temperature decrease from 3.9·103 to 3.3·103 K with increasing O2 content. Mg (II)/Mg (I) intensity ratio decrease from 1.02 to 0.18, the electron density decrease from 6.6·1012 to 4·1011 cm−3. The intensity of N2 (1+ system), N2 (2+ system), N2+, NH, NO, and OH intensities increases to a certain content, and then decrease (NH) or remain constant (OH) when O2 is added. The effect of O2 content on the intensity of several atomic and ionic emission lines (covering Esum values from 1.6 to 14.7 eV) of 22 elements has been studied. The line intensity was suppressed over the entire energy range. It was shown that the O2 addition increased the limit of detection (LOD) by 1.2–4 for lines with Esum of 1.5–4 eV and by 50–60 times for lines with Esum of 4–15 eV.