News from LabRulezICPMS Library - Week 50, 2024

Our Library never stops expanding. What are the most recent contributions to LabRulezICPMS Library in week 50, 2024? Check out new documents from the field of spectroscopy, especially ICP/MS techniques!

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This week we bring you applications by Agilent Technologies, Shimadzu, and Thermo Fisher Scientific!

1. Thermo Fisher Scientific: Multielement analysis of drinking water samples as per regulations from the Bureau of Indian Standards using ICP-MS

• Application

Goal

To demonstrate the performance of the Thermo Scientific™ iCAP™ MSX ICP-MS for analysis of a variety of water samples, including surface waters, groundwaters, and drinking waters, following the Indian Standards’ specifications.

Introduction

The quality of drinking water refers to its safety, purity, and suitability for human consumption. It is essential that drinking water meets specific standards and guidelines to ensure it does not pose any health risks to individuals who consume it. Drinking waters are regularly monitored for the content of different elements, in particular highly toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead, which are severely detrimental for human and environmental health. The regulations applicable for testing and assuring water quality in India are as follows:

• IS 10500:2012 Drinking water - Specification
• IS 13428:2005 Packaged Natural Mineral Water - Specification
• IS 14543:2004 Packaged Drinking Water - Specification

These regulations specify stringent maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) of different toxic and some nutritional elements in drinking water samples, as listed in Table 1.

Drinking water samples must be regularly monitored to ensure that they comply with these regulations. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) is a powerful technique for analyzing a wide range of analytes in given samples, providing superior sensitivity that enables the reliable detection of very low concentrations of analytes in water samples. Additionally, a high robustness of the ICP-MS system is also a desired feature because it helps analytical testing laboratories, carrying out analysis of different drinking water samples regularly, to cope with a high sample load and deliver accurate results on time. While drinking water samples are usually low in Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) content, different drinking waters may be fortified with varying amounts of nutrient elements to increase their nutritional values. When analyzing a mix of such different samples, Argon Gas Dilution (AGD) offers a comprehensive solution for effective handling of a variety of sample types including those with high TDS in one analytical run. In addition, AGD helps to avoid off-line liquid sample dilution, which in turn saves associated labor and cost, and minimizes the risk of contamination, while still delivering consistent results with minimum matrix effects.

This application note describes the analysis of different drinking water samples using the iCAP MSX ICP-MS operated with AGD as a tool to facilitate sample dilution directly during sample introduction.

Conclusion

This application note highlights the ease and effectiveness of using the iCAP MSX ICP-MS in combination with the iSC-65 Autosampler for routine monitoring of water quality in terms of elemental composition. The method described involves a 5-fold dilution of all samples using AGD (Argon Gas Dilution) for the sensitive and reliable elemental analysis across different drinking water samples. By utilizing this approach, accurate and precise results can be obtained for routine water quality monitoring. The instrument performance exceeds the requirements of analytical testing laboratories tasked with the analysis of different water and other environmental samples. The main conclusions are summarized below.

• The use of Argon Gas Dilution, the availability of different dilution levels, and accomplishing dilution automatically inside the instrument with no additional sample handling required reduces time and effort spent in preparing samples and helps achieve seamless measurements of drinking water samples. The AGD features are easy to set up and operate and are fully integrated and supported in the Qtegra ISDS Software.
• Excellent linearity was achieved for all analytes due to the large linear dynamic range of the iCAP MSX ICP-MS, which allows for precise determination of major elements and trace elements with low and high concentrations in one measurement without further sample dilution. The LODs of the different analytes demonstrate that the instrument easily meets and exceeds the sensitivity requirements specified in local regulations pertaining to water analysis.
• Robust and stable analytical performance with exceptional signal stability was demonstrated over a 12-hour uninterrupted sequence.

2. Shimadzu: Infrared Spectra of Polyvinyl Chloride

• Application

User Benefits

PVC can be qualitatively determined by checking specific peaks, and the presence of PVC can be confirmed even when the amount of additive is very large.

Since PVC has few peaks in the fingerprint region, it is easy to qualitatively identify the additives contained in PVC.

Introduction

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a synthetic thermoplastic polymer with excellent water resistance, acid resistance, alkali resistance, electrical nonconductivity, and flame resistance, and is used in a wide variety of applications, including film, synthetic leather, fibers, wire coating, rope, and toys, to name a few. Various types of additives such as plasticizers, stabilizers, and fillers can be added to this PVC resin, so that the final PVC product can be either rigid or soft, depending on the amount of plasticizer added. Various types of plasticizers, for example di-2-ethyl hexyl phthalate (dioctyl phthalate), have been added to PVC at concentrations higher than 10 % to produce soft PVC. Since PVC displays relatively weak infrared absorption, PVC that contains a large amount of phthalic ester is strongly affected by that substance, displaying an infrared spectrum which is more similar in shape to the phthalic ester than PVC. For this reason, many soft PVC samples have shown the similar type of infrared spectrum as the phthalic ester. However, due to concerns about the adverse health affects of these phthalic ester plasticizers, including their carcinogenicity, their application and content levels are regulated. Consequently, soft PVC containing various types of plasticizers instead of those containing phthalic esters are currently being marketed.

Since soft PVC containing a large amount of plasticizer displays an infrared spectrum that is greatly affected by the plasticizer, a variety of infrared spectral shapes are seen with soft PVC. Here we introduce and discuss the infrared spectra of this type of soft PVC.

Conclusion

In this application, we analyzed PVC containing various plasticizers using the ATR method and demonstrated that the C-Cl stretching vibration near 610 cm^-1 is important for identifying PVC. By checking the infrared spectrum using FTIR, it is possible to easily perform qualitative analysis of plasticizers used in soft PVC.

3. Agilent Technologies: Determination of Band Gap in Metal Oxides Using UV-Vis Spectroscopy

• Application

Introduction

The band gap of semiconducting materials plays a critical role in shaping their performance across various electronic and optoelectronic applications. UV-Vis spectroscopy stands as an efficient method for evaluating these band gaps, providing insights into the electronic structure of materials. This understanding is pivotal in refining materials used in fields such as photocatalysis and solar energy conversion.¹

UV-Vis spectroscopy measures the absorbance or reflectance of materials over a range of wavelengths. When the energy of incident photons matches or exceeds the band gap energy, electrons transition from the valence band to the conduction band, leading to distinctive absorption characteristics.

This application note investigates band gap analysis using UV-Vis spectroscopy, and presents a detailed methodology for precise and dependable measurements by leveraging the capabilities of the Agilent Cary 5000 UV-Vis-NIR spectrophotometer and Agilent Cary WinUV software.

Conclusion

The findings of this study highlight the efficacy of using the Agilent Cary 5000 UV-Vis-NIR spectrophotometer combined with Agilent Cary WinUV software for accurate and reliable band gap analysis of semiconducting materials. The integration of the Praying Mantis diffuse reflectance accessory ensured reproducible sample positioning and measurements. The use of the first derivative of wavelength scans, facilitated by the software's built-in calculator function, proved to be a streamlined and precise method for determining band gaps. The band gap values obtained were consistent with established literature, confirming the validity of this approach. This methodology offers a robust and efficient tool for researchers working in fields such as photocatalysis and solar energy conversion, enabling precise characterization of electronic structures in various materials.