Current Status of Direct Solid Sampling for Electrothermal Atomic Absorption Spectrometry—A Critical Review of the Development between 1995 and 2005

Abstract

The literature about direct solid sampling (SS) and slurry sampling atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) over the past decade has been surveyed critically. It became apparent that a very significant change had occurred, particularly in the relation between the two major techniques used for that purpose. In the 1990s, slurry sampling was typically considered the technique of choice, combining the significant advantages of the solid and the liquid sampling methods, at least in part because of the availability of a commercial accessory for automatic slurry sampling. The situation is completely inverted now, as the above accessory has been discontinued and rugged and reliable accessories for direct SS became available. Direct SS electrothermal (ET) AAS has been shown to provide the best limits of detection because of the absence of any dilution and a minimal risk of contamination. Calibration against aqueous standards appears to be feasible after careful program optimization. The absence of any significant sample handling makes SS ET AAS ideally suited for fast screening analyses. The introduction of high‐resolution continuum source AAS appears to open additional attractive features for SS ET AAS because of the significantly simplified optimization of furnace programs and the visibility of the spectral environment, which makes it easy to avoid spectral interferences. New calibration strategies make a “dilution” of samples unnecessary, which used to be one of the major limitations of SS ET AAS. Finally, direct SS analysis is an important contribution to clean chemistry, as practically no reagents are used.     

Acute and chronic MRI changes in the spine and spinal cord after surgical stem cell grafting in patients with definite amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Post-infusion injuries are unrelated with clinical impairment

ObjectiveTo report MRI spinal changes after surgical infusion of bone marrow stem cells (BMSc) in ALS patients and assess their correlation with clinical events and functional performance.MethodsBMSc were surgically injected in the thoracic spinal cord of 11 ALS patients (6/5 male/female; median age 46 years). We performed first-week and third, sixth, ninth and twelfth post-surgical months spinal MRIs. The spinal changes in the postsurgical week and follow-up MRIs, as well as clinical events, functional scales and respiratory and electromyography data, were longitudinally monitored. Correlations between the imaging and clinical data were evaluated with the Spearman's test.ResultsTransient extradural fluid collections (100%), transient spinal cord T2 hyperintensity (81.8%), and chronic spinal cord deformities (63.6%) were the dominating MRI changes. Spinal cord hemorrhages (27.3%) and cystic myelomalacia (1/11 patients) were important although unusual findings. During the follow-up, minor adverse events of mild to moderate intensity eventually improved. Initial and follow-up imaging scores showed a strongly positive correlation (r 0.879, P < 0.001). The initial and delayed clinical scores did not correlate. There was no significant correlation between any of the imaging scores and clinical data.ConclusionsInfusion of BMSc produces a variety of spinal changes apparently unrelated with clinical events and disease worsening.     

Luminescence studies of Co implanted sapphires

Sapphire single crystals implanted with different fluences of cobalt and subjected to annealing treatments in vacuum and in air during 1 v h at 1000 v C were studied by optical and structural techniques. At room temperature the absorption mainly occurs in the ultraviolet (UV) being the luminescence dominated by a UV/blue broad emission band and a highly structured red emission. Structural analysis indicates that metallic precipitates, CoAl 2 O 4 and CoO phases are present in the implanted and annealed samples depending either on the fluence and on the annealing atmosphere. The observed luminescence cannot be correlated with intra-ionic Co 2+ and Co 3+ in an Al 3+ site in the sapphire lattice and a tentative assignment of the observed emission lines to the presence of aggregates is made.     

Transport properties of a 2DEG in the presence of tilted magnetic field: the influence of a 1D modulation

The effect of 1D periodic modulation on the transport and thermodynamic properties of a non-interacting two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) is investigated. The Hamiltonian used also includes a tilted magnetic field, Rashba, and Dresselhauss spin-orbit interactions. The 1D periodic modulation introduces non-quantized regions on Hall conductivity and a non-zero diffusive conductivity. A method to estimate the modulation periodicity is given using the periodicity of Weiss oscillations on the diffusive conductivity.     

Sampling and Sample Homogeneity as Introductory Topics in Analytical Chemistry Undergraduate Courses

This work deals with the development of an experiment to evaluate the effect of sample characteristics on precision and accuracy of the sampling step. Parameters such as sample homogeneity, particle sizes, and sample mass were evaluated by analyzing the standard deviations (n = 3) obtained for Ca, Fe, Mg, Na, P, S, and Zn determinations in a breakfast cereal sample by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry. The proposed experiment can improve the assimilation of important concepts such as sampling, sample representativity, precision and accuracy by undergraduate students in analytical chemistry laboratory courses.     

Strongly nonlinear multivalued elliptic equations on a bounded domain

In this work we study the existence of nontrivial solution for the following class of multivalued quasilinear problems $$\begin{aligned} \displaystyle -\text{ div } ( \phi (|\nabla u|) \nabla u) - b(u)u \in \lambda \partial F(x,u)\;\text{ in }\;\Omega , \quad u=0\; \text{ on }\;\partial \Omega \end{aligned}$$ where $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R }^N$ is a bounded domain, $N\ge 2$ and $\partial F(x,u)$ is a generalized gradient of $F(x,t)$ with respect to $t$ . The main tools utilized are Variational Methods for Locally Lipschitz Functional and a Concentration Compactness Theorem for Orlicz space.     

Factorization of a class of symbols with outer functions

In this paper the Wiener–Hopf (or Riemann–Hilbert) factorization of a class of symbols important in applications is studied. The symbols in this class involve outer functions that appear in applications such as diffraction by strip gratings and infinite-dimensional integrable systems. The method proposed is based on the reduction of a vector Riemann–Hilbert to a scalar problem on an appropriate Riemann surface. Two examples are given leading to the Riemann sphere and to an elliptic curve.     

A rheological equation for anisotropic–anelastic media and simulation of field seismograms

In many cases, geological formations are composed of layers of dissimilar properties whose thicknesses are small compared to the wavelength of the seismic signal, as for instance, a sandstone formation that has intra-reservoir thin mudstone layers. A proper model is represented by an anisotropic (transversely isotropic) and viscoelastic stress–strain relation. In this work, we consider a sandstone reservoir, such as the Utsira formation, saturated with CO₂ and use White’s mesoscopic model to describe the energy loss of the seismic waves. The mudstone layers are assumed to be isotropic, poroelastic and lossless. Then, Backus averaging provides the complex and frequency-dependent stiffnesses of the transversely isotropic (TI) long-wavelength equivalent medium. We obtain the associated wave velocities and quality factors as a function of frequency and propagation direction, while the synthetic seismograms are computed with a finite-element (FE) method in the space-frequency domain. In this way, the frequency-dependent properties of the medium are modeled exactly, without the need of approximations with viscoelastic mechanical models. Numerical simulations of synthetic seismograms show results in agreement with the predictions of the theories and significant differences due to attenuation and anisotropic effects compared to the ideal isotropic and lossless rheology.     

The delay effect on reaction–diffusion equations

In this work we study a reaction–diffusion problem with delay and we make an analysis of the stability of solutions by means of bifurcation theory. We take the delay constant as a parameter. Special conditions on the vector field assure existence of a spatially nonconstant positive equilibrium U_k , which is stable for small values of the delay. An increase of the delay destabilizes the equilibrium of U_k and leads to super or subcritical Hopf bifurcation.