Simple hollow fiber liquid membrane based pre-concentration of silver for atomic absorption spectrometry

摘要

Silver pollution has gained attention in the last few years because silver is being massively used as a bactericide in self-care, medical and textile products. Difficulties of Ag determination are associated with the very low concentrations in which it is normally found (ng La?’1) and the nature of the sample matrix. Standard methods such as liquida€“liquid extraction (LLE) are regularly used. Alternatively, liquid phase micro-extraction (LPME) appears to be an environmentally friendly tool for sample treatment that offers higher pre-concentration factors. This allows the determination of ultra-trace levels of silver using standard instrumental techniques such as atomic absorption spectrometry. In this work, a hollow fiber LPME is proposed. Silver pre-concentration has been conducted using tri-isobutylphosphine sulphide (TIBPS) as a carrier from the sample to an acceptor solution through a solvent placed in the fiber pores. Accurel-PP 50/280 fibers with an internal volume of 20 ??L were used for 50 mL samples. After optimization, 0.1 M KNO3 in the sample, 0.1 M TIBPS in dihexyl ether as the organic phase and 1 M Na2S2O3 in the acceptor solution were established. The system offers enrichment factors of 1053 times, a limit of detection of 1.16 ng La?’1. This method improves the limit of detection of the most recent liquid micro-extraction methods for silver pre-concentration coupled with GFAAS, being in this case comparable to ICP-MS detection based techniques.