Peak shape effects in tungsten electrothermal atomizer atomic absorption spectrometry

Abstract

Absorbance signal generation in the course of electrothermal atomisation in the tungsten tube atomizer can be evaluated on the basis of the height or the integrated area of the absorbance peak. If detection limits are compared, evaluation of peak height absorbance is found to be advantageous. It is shown that the advantage of peak height evaluation increases with analyte volatility. The presence of modifiers affects the efficiency of peak height signal evaluation only if the modifier influences the analyte volatility significantly. No pronounced dependence of the relative standard deviation (RSD) on analyte volatility has been observed, although better RSD values are obtained with peak height signal evaluation. No dependence of the RSD values on the analyte has been observed. For all analytes more favourable values of RSD are obtained with signal evaluation on the basis of peak heights, with or without modifiers.