No abstract

This review describes determinations of mercury compounds under three categories: total mercury; separate determinations of inorganic mercury(I1) and organomercury compounds by selective reduction; and speciation of inorganic mercury(II), monomethylmercury cation, and dimethylmercury. Topics described for each category include sample treatment, separation, detection, and limit of detection. Finally, we note that most methods would not detect dimethylmercury if it were present.

This paper describes optimization details of an analytical method development of a hydride-generation procedure for speciation of mercury(II), monomethylmercury cation, dimethylmercury, and diethylmercury using a heated quartz furnace with an atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS) as a detector. Typically a new analytical method is developed in steps such as the following:(1) determining analytes individually to confirm retention times and the lack of decomposition during the procedure; (2) comparing peak areas of all analytes as a function of quartz furnace temperature to optimize atomization for AAS detection; (3) conducting factorial experiments to determine which hydride-generation reaction conditions are important in maximizing peak areas and which conditions interact with each other; (4) using the simplex optimization method to give final optimization of reaction conditions. These steps result in conditions that maximize optimized peak areas for analytes while minimizing experimental error.