MP-AES

Abstract

Microwave plasma atomic emission spectrometry (MP-AES) utilizes nitrogen gas as a self-sustainable microwave new generation plasma coupled with energy from a 2.45 GHz microwave magnetic field in lieu of a microwave electric field at atmospheric pressure in a Hammer cavity. The plasma generated had a temperature of about 5000 K with a shape allowing a wet sample aerosol into the core of the plasma, similar to ICP-OES. The higher temperature of the microwave plasma than that of flame AAS facilitated matrix decomposition, fewer interfering effects, better DL, multi-element capability, and much lower operational and analysis cost compared to argon ICP-based techniques (ICP-OES and ICP-MS) due to the use of nitrogen in lieu of argon along with reduced safety concerns. The second model of microwave plasma, MP-AES 4200 was released by M/s Agilent, Australia in 2016. The technique achieves significantly better performance due to its ability to enable a combined multimode sample introduction system (MSIS) with cold vapour (CV) generation, photochemical vapour generation (PVG), high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography (GC).