Comparison of fluorine determination in biological and environmental samples by NAA, PAA and PIXE

Capabilities of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), photon activation analysis with radiochemical separation (RPAA) and proton induced γ-ray emission (PIGE) for determination of fluorine in biological and environmental materials are compared in terms of detection limits, nuclear and other interferences. The lowest detection limit of 0.5 μg^.g^-1 was achieved by RPAA, the detection limit of the non destructive and interference-free PIGE method was by one order of magnitude higher, whereas two to three orders of magnitude higher detection limits compared to RPAA were obtained in INAA. A satisfactory agreement was found between the results obtained in this work and reference, mostly information values for several biological and environmental materials. However, higher values of two orders of magnitude were determined by RPAA and PIGE in NIST RM-8414 Bovine Muscle compared to the fluorine information value. The reason for this difference is the contamination of this material with Teflon, which occurred on its preparation and has not been taken into account in establishing the information value. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.