Gold determination in soil by ICP-MS: comparison of sample pretreatment methods
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(2020) 11:45
Journal of Analytical Science and Technology
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Gold determination in soil by ICP-MS: comparison of sample pretreatment methods Xiaodan Tang, Bing Li, Jilong Lu, Hongyan Liu and Yuyan Zhao*
Abstract At present, the direct gold determination in geological samples by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) is still an arduous challenge due to both spectral and background interferences. It is very important and necessary to study the pretreatment processes; therefore, the polyurethane foam treatment and sample digestion methods are explored and compared here. The experimental results showed that the gold adsorption rate of treated foam was significantly improved as the impurities in the foam were cleaned up, and the potential difference of the liquid membrane was increased. Meanwhile, the combination of the foam enrichment and thiourea desorption achieved the selective adsorption and desorption of gold ions, eliminated the interference of coexisting ions, and perfected the detection limits. Compared with the traditional electric heating plate digestion method, microwave digestion, a closed digestion method, had the advantages of less sample and reagent dosage, short time consumption, high degree of automation, thorough digestion, good security, and environmental friendliness and met the requirements of green chemistry development. The proposed microwave digestion-foam enrichment-thiourea desorption-ICP-MS determination method was applied to the gold test in soil samples of the actual gold mining area. It has the great potential as a routine laboratory procedure. Keywords: Gold, Digestion, Foam enrichment, Desorption, Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry
Introduction Gold (Au) is an extraordinary precious metal that is widely used in many fields (Danscher and Larsen 2010; Pyrzynska 2012; Sheoran et al. 2013; Yang and Hashmi 2014; Wang et al. 2015; Noel 2016; Maduraiveeran and Ramaraj 2017; Alim et al. 2018; Yeo et al. 2018), such as petrochemicals, aerospace, information technology, electronics, metallurgy, electrical, nuclear power, jewelry, and medicine. Rapid, sensitive, and accurate Au determination is a long-term concern in geosciences, mining industries, analytical chemistry, and spectroscopy. However, Au has low concentrations in most geological samples; its separation and enrichment are harder than
* Correspondence: [email protected] College of Geo-exploration Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130026, China
other metal elements. Therefore, the Au analysis has always been difficult. Until now, the widely used Au test methods include titration (Stefano et al. 2015), atomic absorption spectrometry (Yilmaz and Soylak 2014; Choi et al. 2017; Zhou et al. 2017; Tang et al. 2019), inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (George and Konstantinos 2016; Hassan et al. 2016; Xue et al. 2016), microwave plasma atomic emission spectrometry (Balaram et al. 2013), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) (
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