Atomic spectrometry update. Industrial analysis: metals, chemicals and advanced materials

This Atomic Spectrometry Update is the latest in an annual series under the title 'Industrial Analysis'. The job of topic group co-ordinator has passed from Ben Fairman to Andy Fisher but, other than that, the writing team has stayed the same. The general structure of the review is the same as last year, but there has been an attempt to reduce the size of the tables and to be more descriptive and critical in the text instead. The use of techniques capable of analysing solid materials directly has increased greatly for the analysis of metals during this review period. Therefore, techniques such as LIBS, laser ablation, glow discharge and X-ray fluorescence have all proved popular. The determination of S and Hg in petroleum products and in coals, respectively, has proved to be the most popular area of interest in these materials in this review period. Similarly, there have been a large number of applications that have used funtionalised resins to either pre-concentrate analytes or to separate the matrix during the analysis of samples. There has been a noticeable increase in the number of papers reporting the use of multi-collector ICP-MS during the analysis of inorganic materials. Also noticeable is the predominance of solid sampling techniques such as ETV and LA. The solid sampling theme is also prevalent in the analysis of advanced materials. Here, techniques such as laser ablation, TRXRF and slurry introduction have proved to be popular, since they do not require dissolution/digestion of the samples, which for many of these sample types can be problematical. The catalysts section has seen a significant increase in the number of relevant abstracts when compared with last year. It is also noticeable that for many of the advanced materials, the abstracts indicate that an atomic spectrometric technique has been used, but that details of sample preparation and of results are very scarce.