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Comparative study of the vibrating capillary nebulizer (VCN) and commercially available interfaces for on-line coupling of capillary electrophoresis with ICP-MS

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Abstract

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a powerful and sensitive tool for speciation analysis when combined with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS); however, the performance of this technique can be limited by the nature of pneumatic nebulizers. This study compares two commercially available pneumatic nebulizers to a newly introduced vibrating capillary nebulizer (VCN) for on-line coupling of CE with ICP-MS. The VCN is a low-cost, non-pneumatic nebulizer that is based on the design of capillary vibrating sharp-edge spray ionization. As a piezoelectrically driven nebulization source, the VCN creates an aerosol independent of gas flows and does not produce a low-pressure region at the nebulizer orifice. To compare the systems, we performed replicate analyses of sulfate in river water with each nebulizer and the same CE and ICP-MS instruments and determined the figures of merit of each setup. With the CE-VCN-ICP-MS setup, we achieved around 2–4 times lower sensitivity compared to the commercial setups. However, the VCN-based setup provided lower noise levels and better linear correlation from the analysis of calibration standards, which resulted in indistinguishable LOD and LOQ values from the in-house-built VCN-based and commercial setups for CE-ICP-MS analysis. The VCN is found to have the highest baseline stability with a standard deviation of 3500 cts s−1, corresponding to an RSD of 2.7%. High reproducibility is found with the VCN with a peak area RSD of 4.1% between 3 replicate measurements.

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Funding

The authors thank the Analytical Chemistry Division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) for the ABC publication grant awarded to T.T. in support of her research stay at BAM. The authors would also like to acknowledge funding sources for this work, including an Iowa State University Faculty startup grant. D.T. thanks the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding (ME 3685/5–1, project number: 440953647). T.P.T.D. gratefully acknowledges Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree Program EACH—Excellence in Analytical Chemistry, supported by the Erasmus + Program of the European Union.

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Author notes

  1. Tristen L. Taylor and Dariya Tukhmetova contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Tristen L. Taylor & Alexander Gundlach-Graham

  2. Division 1.1 – Inorganic Trace Analysis, Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), Berlin, Germany

    Dariya Tukhmetova, Thi Phuong Thanh Duong & Björn Meermann

  3. Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Thi Phuong Thanh Duong

  4. Division 4.3 - Contaminant Transport and Environmental Technologies, Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), Berlin, Germany

    Anna-Maria Böwe

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  1. Tristen L. Taylor
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Correspondence to Björn Meermann or Alexander Gundlach-Graham.

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Taylor, T.L., Tukhmetova, D., Duong, T.P.T. et al. Comparative study of the vibrating capillary nebulizer (VCN) and commercially available interfaces for on-line coupling of capillary electrophoresis with ICP-MS. Anal Bioanal Chem 416, 1613–1621 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-024-05162-7

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