On-line simultaneous pre-concentration procedure for the determination of cadmium and lead in drinking water employing sequential multi-element flame atomic absorption spectrometry

Abstract

An on-line pre-concentration system for the sequential determination of cadmium and lead in drinking water by using fast sequential flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FS-FAAS) is proposed in this paper. Two minicolums of polyurethane foam loaded with 2-(6-methyl-2-benzothiazolylazo)-orcinol (Me-BTAO) were used as sorptive pre-concentration media for cadmium and lead. The analytical procedure involves the quantitative uptake of both analyte species by on-column chelation with Me-BTAO during sample loading followed by sequential elution of the analytes with 1.0 mol L⁻¹ hydrochloric acid and determination by FS-FAAS. The optimisation of the entire analytical procedure was performed using a Box–Behnken multivariate design utilising the sampling flow rate, sample pH and buffer concentration as experimental variables.

The proposed flow-based method featured detection limits (3σ) of 0.08 and 0.51 µg L⁻¹ for cadmium and lead, respectively, precision expressed as relative standard deviation (RSD) of 1.63% and 3.87% (n = 7) for cadmium at the 2.0 µg L⁻¹ and 10.0 µg L⁻¹ levels, respectively, and RSD of 6.34% and 3.26% (n = 7) for lead at the 5.0 µg L⁻¹ and 30.0 µg L⁻¹ levels, respectively. The enrichment factors achieved were 38.6 and 30.0 for cadmium and lead, respectively, using a sample volume of 10.0 mL. The sampling frequency was 45 samples per hour. The accuracy was confirmed by analysis of a certified reference material, namely, SRM 1643d (Trace elements in natural water). The optimised method was applied to the determination of cadmium and lead in drinking water samples collected in Santo Amaro da Purificação City, Bahia, Brazil.

Keywords:

• on-line pre-concentration
• sequential determination
• cadmium, lead
• drinking water
• flame atomic absorption spectrometry

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado da Bahia (FAPESB), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for providing grants and fellowships and for financial support.