Concentration of some heavy metals such as As, Hg, Pb, Cd and Sn in food is a very important hygienic index. Because several of these elements are highly toxic, determining them at low concentration levels is of great importance for food factories.
In recent years, hydride generation atomic fluorescence spectrometers useful for determining the elements that form hydrides such as Pb, Hg, Cd, Zn, As, Sb, Bi, Ge, Sn and Se have been developed. Hydride generation technique provided a method for concentrating analytes and led to enhancing the detection limits for these elements by a factor of 10 to 100. This single-channel hydride generation atomic fluorescence spectrometer (HG-AFS) has some shortages like impossible simultaneous determination of several elements and long analysis time.
The advent of atomic fluorescence spectrometers equipped with a non-dispersive system led to the development of a multichannel atomic fluorescence spectrometer for simultaneous determination of several elements. The non-dispersive atomic fluorescence spectrometry (NDAFS) has several advantages of simple and low-cost instrumentation, adaptability to multi-element analysis, and highly-sensitive and simultaneous collection of energy from multiple lines.
There have been many reports on simultaneous determination by this spectrometer, but most of them are for two elements, and the only three-element simultaneous determination is As-Sb-Se simultaneous determination.
Ri Un Hui, a researcher at the Faculty of Metal Engineering, has studied the optimal conditions and method for simultaneous determination of As, Sn and Cd, and successfully introduced them into the analysis of several kinds of food.
This method can be widely used for analyzing not only food but also soil, water, biological samples, the environment, etc.