Dry ashing of organic rich matrices with palladium for the determination of arsenic using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry

A dry ashing procedure is developed for the determination of As in organic rich matrices such as wheat flour, lichen and tobacco leaves. The volatility of As during dry ashing is avoided by the addition of palladium nitrate [Pd(NO₃)₂]. The recovery of both As(III) and As(V) is found to be near quantitative. The residue after dry ashing is dissolved in nitric acid (HNO₃) and analysed by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The process blank and limit of detection (LOD) are 11 and 6.6 ng g⁻¹, respectively. The procedure is applied for the determination of As in certified reference materials namely wheat flour NIST SRM 1567a (National Institute of Standards and Technology Standard Reference Material), lichen BCR CRM 482 (Institute for Reference Materials, European Commission) and Virginia tobacco leaves CTA-VTL-2 (Poland Academy of Sciences). The results obtained by the present procedure are in good agreement with the certified values and also determined after complete dissolution of samples using closed microwave digestion.