Species-Selective Analysis by Microcolumn Multicapillary Gas Chromatography with Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometric Detection

Abstract

A glass rod (5-20 cm long, 2 mm o.d.) containing more than 1200 parallel microchannels (< 40 microns i.d.) was converted into a high-resolution (> 100 theoretical plates cm-1) GC column by coating the inside of each channel in a way that compensated for the dispersion of the channel inner diameter. The columns were evaluated for the separation of mixtures of several organometallic (Hg, Sn, Pb) compounds prior to on-line sensitive metalselective detection by ICPMS. Chromatographic separation conditions were optimized to enable a rapid (within a maximum 30 s) multielemental speciation analysis. Absolute detection limits were 0.1 pg for Hg, 0.05 pg for Sn, and 0.03 pg for Pb using the carrier gas flows of approximately 200 mL min-1. The microcolumn multicapillary GC/ICPMS developed was applied to the analysis of a number of environmental samples. The results were validated with certified reference materials for tin (BCR477, PACS-2) and mercury (DORM-1, TORT-1).