Effects of Iron Concentration Level in Extracting Solutions from Contaminated Soils on the Determination of Zinc by Flame Atomic Absorption Spectrometry with Two Background Correctors

Christophe Waterlot,Francis Douay,Aurélie Pelfrêne

doi:10.1155/2012/512709

Christophe Waterlot, Francis Douay + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/512709

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Abstract

Zinc and iron concentrations were determined after digestion, water, and three-step sequential extractions of contaminated soils. Analyses were carried out using flame absorption spectrometry with two background correctors: a deuterium lamp used as the continuum light source (D2 method) and the high-speed self-reversal method (HSSR method). Regarding the preliminary results obtained with synthetic solutions, the D2 method often emerged as an unsuitable configuration for compensating iron spectral interferences. In contrast, the HSSR method appeared as a convenient and powerful configuration and was tested for the determination of zinc in contaminated soils containing high amounts of iron. Simple, fast, and interference-free method, the HSSR method allows zinc determination at the ppb level in the presence of large amounts of iron with high stability, sensitivity, and reproducibility of results. Therefore, the HSSR method is described here as a promising approach for monitoring zinc concentrations in various iron-containing samples without any pretreatment.

Highlights

Flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS) is often described as a fast, simple, and sensitive technique for the measurement of zinc (Zn)
Analyses were carried out using flame absorption spectrometry with two background correctors: a deuterium lamp used as the continuum light source (D2 method) and the high-speed self-reversal method (HSSR method)
These results indicate that the HSSR method had the lowest sensitivity and imply that the limiting absorbance values are smaller than those for the D2 method

Summary

Introduction

Flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS) is often described as a fast, simple, and sensitive technique for the measurement of zinc (Zn) This technique is widely used for the determination of Zn at trace levels in biological samples and food after mineralization process [1,2,3,4], but it usually requires pretreatment of samples such as sorption and/or preconcentration [5, 6], coprecipitation [7,8,9], liquid-liquid extraction [9, 10], solid-phase extraction [9,10,11,12,13,14,15], and more recently cloud point extraction [16, 17] in order to eliminate the matrix effects.

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