A New Tool for Environmental Analysis using icp - Lisa Goldstone, Jean Michel Mermet, Yves Danthez, Cendrine Dubuisson, Emmanuel Fretel, Olivier Rogerieux spectrometry

Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical (or Atomic) Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES/AES) is an efficient analytical process for the determination of inorganic pollutants in environmentally relevant matrices. With the establishment of EPA Method 200.7, ISO 11885: 1997 and DIN 38 406, Part 22 the application of this technique has been selected as the standard method of analysis for water, wastewater and sludge. Customer applications may vary from one lab to the next: monitoring toxic elements in effluents or sludges, leachates from wastes, and even air particulates in the workingatmosphere. In this paper we will present data on the analysis of certified samples of water and sludge to validate the new ACTIVA™ ICP Spectrometer featuring Advanced CCD Technology with simultaneous SimShot acquisition.

Instrument Description
ACTIVA incorporates a new innovative design featuring a 0.64 m Czerny-Turner optical system. This dispersive system integrates an Achromatic Entrance Imager that was designed to optimize photon collection and minimize optical aberrations. Compared to the use of a single lens for focusing, the Achromatic Entrance Imager uses 2 mirrors: one concave and one plane. The concave mirror is inherently free of chromatic aberrations across the spectrum, rather than at one wavelength, and the plane mirror directs the light into the optical system. The Achromatic Imager uses a MgF2 window. This Imager has been designed for imaging the best analytical zone of the plasma onto the 6 mm entrance slit height. It allows radial viewing of the entire 10 mm Normal Analytical Zone of the plasma. This entrance slit is imaged through the spectrometer onto the full 6 mm height of the 2048 wide x 512 high pixel detector. This entrance optic associated with large Czerny Turner optical components featuring 80 mm x 110 mm dual gratings, provides the highest optical luminosity from the far UV to the near infrared.

ACTIVA operates with several nm wide spectral windows called Wavelength Analytical Views (WAV). The width is given by the reciprocal linear dispersion (RLD) of the grating multiplied by the detector pixel size and the number of pixels. The aberration free, JY holographic gratings combined with the 2048 pixel wide CCD detector result in two WAV sizes: up to 8 and 16 nanometers. The two gratings are used back-to-back to provide first order light from 165 to 800 nm. The use of first order light eliminates order hopping resulting from overlapping orders typically seen in echelle grating spectrometers and results in a constant intensity across the WAV. The ACTIVA CCD is at the super flat field position of the Czerny-Turner spectrometer allowing an excellent constant resolution and a constant intensity within a WAV.