A simple and demountable capillary microflow nebulizer with a tapered tip for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry

A simple and demountable capillary microflow nebulizer (d-CMN) was developed for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). It consisted of a nebulizer body, a fused-silica capillary with a tapered tip and a polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) adapter. The gas orifice i.d., the solution capillary tip i.d. and its wall thickness were 200, 30, and 5 μm, respectively. The sensitivities, detection limits, precisions and the long-term stability with the d-CMN were evaluated. The experimental results indicated that its performances at low uptake rates were similar or better than those obtained with the conventional concentric nebulizer at 820 μL/min and the micromist nebulizer at 200 μL/min. The demountable construction of the d-CMN permitted that the blocked or broken solution capillary could be conveniently renewed. The low self-aspiration rate (4.77 μL/min) and the analytical characteristics comparable to commercial microflow nebulizers made the d-CMN a good choice for coupling capillary electrophoresis and microbore high-performance liquid chromatograph to ICP-MS. The proposed d-CMN was successfully applied in the iodine speciation by coupling microchip capillary electrophoresis (MCE) to ICP-MS. The absolute detection limits for iodide and iodate of 0.20 and 0.29 fg were achieved with satisfactory resolution.