Determination of mercury, selenium, bismuth, arsenic and antimony in human hair by microwave digestion atomic fluorescence spectrometry

A novel method for determination of Hg, Se, Bi, As and Sb based on microwave digestion followed by continuous flow vapour generation atomic fluorescence spectrometry was developed. The digestion for Hg was based on a two stage digestion involving HNO3 and H2O2, whilst for the hydride forming elements a common digestion using HCl and H2O2 was found to be the most effective. The instrumentation and chemistry were optimised in order to provide the best accuracy and precision. The method detection limit for hair samples was found to be 0.2 ng g−1 for Hg and between 2 and 10 ng g−1 for the hydride forming elements. The atomic fluorescence detector showed excellent linearity over the concentration ranges studied with linear correlation co-efficients between 0.99984 and 0.99997. To validate the accuracy of the method a human hair certified reference material (GBW 0706) was analysed and excellent agreement with the certified value was obtained for all elements.