Study of the effect of organic emulsified samples in inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry

A study of the plasma discharge was carried out in order to evaluate the possible effects of the introduction of emulsified samples. Several plasma diagnostic parameters such as excitation temperature, electron number density, ionic-to-atomic intensity ratio and atomic-to-molecular carbon intensity ratio were measured. Organic solvents with different evaporation factors and crude oil were used as the oil phase in the emulsion. Typical operating conditions for ICP-AES were employed for all the experiments. Generally, the results show that an oil phase such as xylene in the emulsion can perturb the plasma discharge processes. Also, an evaluation of the diagnostic parameters shows that a crude oil in water emulsion has a similar effect to an aqueous solution on the plasma discharge. This result confirms that plasma emission is mainly perturbed by the volatility of the organic material in the emulsion.