A New Simpler Method for Mercury in Water using HG/PID
Accepted for presentation at PITTCON 2021
AUTHORS: Jack Driscoll, President, PID Analyzers, LLC and Jennifer Maclachlan, Managing Director, PID Analyzers, LLC
Environmental Methods for Clean Water
Description
At the 2015 PITTCON held in New Orleans, LA we discussed "A new method for the analysis of ppb levels of mercury in air and water". This method used hydride generation (HG) to generate elemental mercury which was made specific using gas chromatography (GC) to remove any organic interferences configured with a photoionization detector (PID). In 2021, we have developed a new simpler method of hydride generation by adding permanganate to the reducing solution to oxidize any organic compounds, we remove any residual water, then employ a PID with a 10.6 electron volt (eV) lamp to detect mercury which has an ionization potential of 10.4eV. Eliminating the need for the use of a GC with this new method not only saves time, it is more cost effective. Additionally, the detection limits for the HG/PID have been improved by at least an order of magnitude.
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