[Determination of 9 heavy metal elements in sediment by ICP-MS using microwave digestion for sample preparation].

A method for determining 9 heavy metal elements in soil and sediment was developed by using microwave digestion-ICP-MS. The mixture of HNO3-H2O2-HF was found to give the best digestion results for soil and sediment of samples. Under the optimized conditions, the samples were analyzed by ICP-MS with the triple internal standard elements Ge, In and Bi. The results showed that all their correlation coefficients were over 0.999. The national standard soil referenee material (ESS-1 GSBZ50011-88) was analyzed by the described method and the results were accorded with the reference values. The measurement precision range was from 0.48% to 5.73% in terms of relative standard deviation. The recoveries and the limits of detection were in the ranges of 98.0% to 100.7% and 0.011 to 0.328 microg x L(-1) respectively, and 11 sediment samples were determined by the proposed method. It was indicated that the method was reliable for determining heavy metal elements in soil and sediment samples.