Determination of arsenic and antimony by atmospheric pressure glow discharge portable emission spectrometer with solid acid hydride generation

In this work, the use of solid acid hydride generation (HG) for the simultaneous determination of As and Sb in environmental water samples by miniaturized atmospheric pressure glow discharge plasma optical emission spectrometer (APGD-OES) was evaluated. It was found that HG with the use of sulfamic acid tablets can achieve comparable sensitivity with conventional HCl-KBH4 for As and Sb determination by APGD-OES, which avoids the safety issue encountered in the use of hydrochloric acid and greatly facilitates field analysis. Under optimal conditions, the obtained detection limits (LODs) are as low as 1.26 μg L−1 for As and 0.72 μg L−1 for Sb, respectively. Moreover, it offers good repeatability, where the relative standard deviations (RSDs) are less than 2.5%. The accuracy of the proposed method was validated by the analysis of simulated natural water reference samples. Furthermore, it has been successfully applied to the determination of tap water, pond water, and hot spring samples. All these results clearly demonstrate the proposed simple, cost-effective and field-deployable method provides a promising approach for the field analysis of As and Sb.