Method for quantitative measurements of carbon nanotubes mass amount in liquid and solid media including organic materials

Abstract

The goal of this study is to develop a universal, simple and cheap method to measure the concentration of carbon nanoparticles in heterogeneous organic solid or liquid media. The proposed method of quantitative measurements of carbon nanoparticles is based on the use of hard-to-remove impurities-catalysts present in most commercially produced carbon nanoparticles. These impurities are metals of the transition group of the periodic table, rare or alkali metals. These impurities form markers on the carbon nanoparticles, which can be detected in liquid and solid matrices without any special sample preparation by non-destructive nuclear physical methods of elemental analysis, e.g., neutron activation analysis or x-ray fluorescence analysis. Detection and quantitative analysis of carbon nanoparticles, especially in an organic matrix is a quite difficult problem. It becomes most difficult in biological samples which demonstrate heterogeneous media with complicated chemical and phase composition. To resolve this problem a lot of methods were developed and presented in dozens of patents and manuscripts. The fact is that now there is a good method for any particular case, but usually all of the methods are very laborious, time consuming and highly specialised. It is important that there are experiments (e.g., biological study of assimilation, distribution, metabolism and excretion of nanoparticles in living organisms), which need analyses of hundreds of samples. Thus labour consuming and cost of measurements are major braking factors. The proposed method requires short time and low labour cost. The method can be used in materials science, as well as in ecology, biology and experimental pharmacology.