AEROSOL MASS MEASUREMENT AND SOLUTION STANDARD ADDITIONS FOR QUANTITATION IN LASER-ABLATION INDUCTIVELY-COUPLED PLASMA-ATOMIC EMISSION-SPECTROMETRY

A new approach for quantitation in laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (LA-ICPAES) is presented. A portion of the laser-ablated sample aerosol is diverted to an aerosol mass monitor to measure variations in the amount of sample ablated and transported to the ICP torch. This provides a normalization for variations in laser ablation efficiency due to changes in laser power and focus at the sample and variations in material transport out of the ablation cell and into the ICP torch. During the laser ablation sampling process, solution standards are nebulized and the aerosol is added to the laser-ablated aerosol to generate a standard addition curve for the analyte being determined. The standard addition procedure corrects for potential plasma-related matrix effects in the ICP emission signal resulting from the ablated sample, The precision of this method, for triplicate analyses far the determination of 16 elements is four glass samples, and the accuracy of this method relative to the nominal glass compositions are both approximately 10%.