Differential amalgamation and release from gold-beads was investigated for its potential in mercury speciation. Elemental mercury, methylethylmercury, methylpropylmercury, diethylmercury, ethylpropylmercury, and mercury chloride were investigated to develop trends regarding amalgamation and release from gold-traps as functions of temperature. Gold-traps were collected from purging spiked aqueous samples and desorbing (or, de-amalgamating) was performed inline with atomic fluorescence spectroscopy detection. Optimization the purge steps, temperature ramp profile of the flash desorption, and sample pre-treatment with matrix additives significantly impacted species differentiation. This work has shown that flash de-amalgamation of gold-trapped mercury species may be effectively leveraged to accomplish quantitative speciation of purged aqueous samples. However, selective and precision must be improved in future work to attain a standalone, not confirmatory, speciation method. Mean pool quantitative accuracy of all mercury species in this work was 101 ±26%. This developed method was applied to mercury speciation analysis in aqueous industrial waste samples.

Attaining quantitative speciation by leveraging varying strengths of amalgamation by mercury species in gold-bead traps

2019 Fall National Meeting

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