Introduction:

Notwithstanding the possibilities of capillary gas chromatography (CGC) coupled to atomic emission detection (CGC-AED) for metal speciation, there are a number of features that make the hyphenated CGC-ICP-MS method unique. State-of-the-art ICP-MS instrumentation provides sensitivities that no other technique can offer, and allows multielement detection in a single run. Moreover, the argon (Ar) plasma is more stable than the helium (He) microwave-induced plasma in atomic emission detection (AED), and solvent venting in CGC-ICP-MS becomes redundant. In addition, ICP-MS offers isotopic information of the elements of interest, enabling even isotope dilution techniques to be used as the calibration method.

Keywords: capillary GC, ICP-MS, GC-ICP-MS, hyphenated system, speciation analysis, HP 6890 GC, HP 4500 ICP-MS, (Agilent Technologies, formerly Hewlett-Packard), methylmercury (MM), trimethyl lead (TML), dimethyllead (DML), monobutyltin (MBT), dibutyltin (DBT), tributyltin (TBT), and tripropyltin (TNT)