| Abstract: | A flame photometric detector using quartz surface-induced tin emission was designed and evaluated for quantification analysis of butyltin species. It has been demonstrated that this quartz surface-induced tin emission, centred at 390 nm, is more sensitive than the commonly used gas-phase emission at 610 nm. The dependence of detector response on quartz enclosure was studied. The operational variables such as hydrogen–air flow rate, carrier-gas flow rate and purge-gas flow rate were optimized. An analytical procedure for speciation analysis of butyltin species in water using simultaneous hydride generation with sodium borohydride and extraction into dichloromethane was established. The detection limits (defined as the signals that equal three times the deviations of the noise) were 0.3 pg of Sn for tetrabutyltin (TeBT), 5 pg of Sn for monobutyltin (MBT), 18 pg of Sn for dibutyltin (DBT) and 2 pg of Sn for tributyltin (TBT), which are approximately 10- to 30-fold better than those reported for using more commonly used gas-phase emission centred at 610 nm. |
