Determination of Methylmercury and Inorganic Mercury in Sediments by High Performance Liquid Chromatography Hyphenated to Cold Vapor Generation Atomic Fluorescence Spectrometry Following a Microwave-Assisted Extraction

Abstract

A high performance liquid chromatography(HPLC) coupled with cold vapor generation atomic fluorescence spectrometry method(CVAFS) has been developed for the separation and determination of methylmercury(MeHg+) and inorganic mercury(Hg2+) in sediment samples.The previous extraction of samples was carried out at a temperature of 80 ℃ for 8 min by using 0.1%(V/V) 2-mercaptoethanol as the extractant.The separation and determination of mercury species were achieved by direct injecting the extractant to HPLC-CVAFS system.Under the optimized conditions,the limit of detection was 0.58 ng/g for MeHg+ and 0.48 ng/g for Hg2+.The average recoveries were 96.2% and 95.8% for MeHg+ and Hg2+,respectively,by spiking three concentration levels of mercury species into samples.The proposed method was validated for the determination of certified reference material IAEA-405 and ERM-CC580,and the analytical results were in good agreement with the certified values.The proposed method was simple,rapid,accurate,no interference and suitable for the determination of methylmercury and inorganic mercury in sediment samples.