TY - JOUR A1 - You, Zengchao A1 - Akkus, Asli A1 - Weisheit, W. A1 - Giray, Thorsten A1 - Penk, Sibylle A1 - Buttler, Sabine A1 - Recknagel, Sebastian A1 - Abad Andrade, Carlos Enrique T1 - Multielement analysis in soils using nitrogen microwave inductively coupled atmospheric pressure plasma mass spectrometry JF - Journal of analytical atomic spectrometry N2 - In this study, we employed nitrogen microwave inductively coupled atmospheric-pressure plasma (MICAP) combined with quadrupole mass spectrometry (MS) and a liquid sample introduction system to analyze heavy metals in soils. The vanadium, cobalt, nickel, zinc, copper, chromium, arsenic, lead, and cadmium contents in seven reference and three environmental soil samples determined using MICAP-MS were within the uncertainty of the reference values, indicating that MICAP-MS is promising for soil analysis similar to the conventional inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) technique. In addition, the limits of detection (LODs) and sensitivity of both techniques using N2 and Ar plasma were of the same order of magnitude. Furthermore, the performance of MICAP-MS under different N2 purity was investigated, and we found that the plasma formation and ionization efficiency were not influenced by the impurities in the gas. A prominent advantage of MICAP-MS is the low operating cost associated with gas consumption. In this work, MICAP-MS used nitrogen, which is cheaper than argon, and consumed 25% less gas than ICP-MS. Using low-purity N2 can further reduce the gas cost, making MICAP-MS more cost effective than ICP-MS. These results suggest that MICAP-MS is a promising alternative to ICP-MS for the analysis of heavy metals in the soil. KW - Soil KW - Microwave inductively coupled atmospheric pressure mass spectrometry (MICAP-MS) KW - Nitrogen plasma KW - Multi-element analysis PY - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-561048 DO - https://doi.org/10.1039/d2ja00244b SN - 0267-9477 VL - 37 IS - 12 SP - 2556 EP - 2562 PB - Royal Society of Chemistry CY - Cambridge AN - OPUS4-56104 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -