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CORESTA Congress, Kyoto, 2004, SS 21

Simultaneous determination of selected metals in mainstream smoke by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry with a Dynamic Reaction Cell

FUKAI Y.; ARAI M.; MIYOSHI M.; SUHARA S.
Japan Tobacco Inc., Product Quality Research Division, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

An analytical method has been developed using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP/MS) with a Dynamic Reaction Cell (DRC) for the simultaneous determination of selected metals found in mainstream cigarette smoke. Conditioned Kentucky Reference 2R4F cigarettes were smoked with an RM20/CS smoking machine under ISO conditions. Mainstream smoke was collected by an electrostatic precipitation (EP) smoke trap. Smoke condensate from the EP tube was digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide using a Mars 5 microwave oven digester. A mixed solution of indium, gallium, and bismuth was spiked as the internal standard for each of the samples and 8 elements (arsenic, selenium, chromium, lead, cadmium, nickel, beryllium, cobalt) were determined by ICP/MS with DRC simultaneously. The ICP/MS analysis time for each sample was approximately 3 minutes. Linear calibration for all analytes over the analysis range gave an ;value greater than 0.999. The instrumental quantitation limit was 0.03 - 0.22 ppb for each analyte. The recovery of the method was evaluated with spiked samples of the reference cigarettes (2R4F). For all metals investigated, average recoveries obtained from different spiked cigarette smoke matrices were 95 - 115% with an RSD below 6%. This study showed that the DRC technique is effective in reducing the interferences of polyatomic ions that were generated during the ionization process of cigarette smoke samples in the argon plasma. In addition, these internal standards worked to improve the recovery for each element, especially for As and Se. The efficiency of these techniques for simultaneous determinations and the details of the validation results will be presented.