Mercury is a global pollutant and is identified as a highly toxic element because of its accumulative and persistent character in the environment and living organisms. Therefore, routine monitoring and control of mercury are becoming increasingly important in natural environment. Several analytical techniques have been developed for the determination of mercury and cold vapor atomic absorption spectroscopy (CV-AAS) is the most widely used one. However, CV-AAS is not straightforwardly applicable to some environmental, clinical, or biological samples in view of low analyte content and matrix of the sample. Atomic fluorescence spectrometry (AFS) detection, especially coupled with the cold vapor (CV) technique, is becoming popular and replacing atomic absorption spectroscopy for mercury analysis due to its simple instrumentation, relatively low cost of operation, high sensitivity and selectivity and ultra low detection limits, which can be evidenced by its approval by the US Environmental Protection Agency for the analysis of mercury in uncontaminated water. Speciation analysis brings important information on the real toxicity and migration pathways of mercury. The need for this kind of information has stimulated development of analytical solutions allowing separation of mercury species such as sequential extraction procedures and hyphenated techniques. The paper presents perspectives of development and application of determinations of total mercury and mercury species in environmental samples by the atomic fluorescence spectroscopy method based on cold vapor generation (CV-AFS). The different sequential extraction procedures in estimation of mercury mobility and bioavailability were also critically reviewed. Ranges of published detection limits achievable for mercury species determination by using different hyphenated techniques are also given. High pressure liquid chromatography coupled to AFS has become a very important tool in determination of mercury species in environmental samples in last years. The paper presents the possibilities of current analytical methods available with use this technique.
JavaScript jest wyłączony w Twojej przeglądarce internetowej. Włącz go, a następnie odśwież stronę, aby móc w pełni z niej korzystać.