Home > Technical Articles > EPA Method 200.8
EPA Method 200.8 was promulgated on January 4, 1995 for drinking water metals including mercury but not yet for selenium. Mercury has a tendency to adsorb onto the glassware. Therefore in ICPMS, which has a glass or Ryton spray chamber, calibration curves tend to be second order and wash out times tend to be long.
Sensitivity is not an issue for mercury by ICPMS as it is for ICPOES, and as long as concentrations are kept below 10 ppb, mercury is usually well-behaved. In fact we have obtained better results for the EPA PE samples with ICPMS than the permanganate digestion/cold vapor technique because the organic mercury in the PE samples does not need to be digested for ICPMS. We now add gold to the samples and blank wash solutions to complex the mercury according to 200.8. This makes the calibration curves linear and keeps wash out times shorter.
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