An overview of electrothermal excitation sources for atomic emission spectrometry

Electrothermal devices have been employed in analytical atomic spectrometry for more than four decades. Normally these resistively heated devices are used to provide an atomic cloud that is either probed by an external light source (atomic absorption and atomic fluorescence) or swept into a second excitation source such as the inductively coupled plasma (electrothermal vaporization). Less commonly, the electrothermal device both produces the atomic vapor and excites the emission of the atoms in the cloud. This brief review, with 65 selected references, will describe those occasions where electrothermal devices are indeed employed in this manner, with no other source of excitation energy applied. Beginning with a graphite furnace system described in 1975 and ending with a tungsten coil application published in 2008, analytical figures of merit will be reported for methods involving devices fabricated from carbon, molybdenum, and tungsten. The review ends with a discussion of the practical limitations associated with these techniques.