The quantitative analysis of toxic metals in plastics is very important for different sectors of industry and daily life. Many routine procedures have been established based on X-ray fluorescence or inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry. However, all of them require suitable reference materials to calibrate or validate. These reference materials ideally are being certified by reference procedures. The development of such reference procedures for sulfur and the four toxic elements cadmium, chromium, mercury and lead in plastics is described here. The procedures are based on double isotope dilution mass spectrometry including analyte–matrix separation. The applied mass spectrometric techniques are thermal ionization mass spectrometry as well as inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Memory effects of mercury and dissolution of chromium(III) oxide have been considered especially. The expanded uncertainties have been improved from the percent range down to the per mill range during the development of the procedure from the early analysis of BCR-680/681 to the recent analysis of CCQM-P106. With the fully developed procedures expanded uncertainties (k = 2) between 0.1 and 0.4% for cadmium, chromium, lead and sulfur and around 1% for mercury can be achieved. The so developed procedures have been successfully applied to the certification of reference materials as well as to intercomparisons organized by CCQM.
Certification report for the reference materials ERM-AE102a, -AE104a, -AE120, -AE121 and -AE122
(2010)
Isotope reference materials are essential to enable reliable and comparable isotope data. Besides the correction of mass fractionation or mass discrimination isotope reference materials are indispensible for validation and quality control of analytical procedures. This article describes the production and certification of a set of five isotope reference materials ERM-AE102a, 104a, AE120, 121 and 122, for boron isotope analysis. The isotopic composition of all materials has been adjusted by mixing boron mother solutions enriched in 10B or 11B with a boron mother solution having natural-like isotopic composition under full gravimetric control. All mother solutions have been analysed for their boron mass fraction as well as their boron isotopic composition by TIMS using IDMS as calibration technique. For all five reference materials the isotopic composition obtained on the basis of the gravimetric data agrees very well with the isotopic composition obtained from different TIMS techniques. Performed stability and homogeneity studies show no significant influence on the isotopic composition as well as on the related uncertainties.
The certified isotope abundances for 10B are 0.29995 (27) for ERM-AE102a and 0.31488 (28) for ERM-AE104a. The certified δ11B values are -20.2 (6) ‰ for ERM-AE120, 19.9(6) ‰ for ERM-AE121 and 39.7 (6) ‰ for ERM-AE122.
Together with the formerly certified ERM-AE101 and -AE103 a unique set of seven certified reference materials (CRM) for boron isotope analysis is now available from BAM.