Evaluation of the Memory Effect on Gold-Coated Silica Adsorption Tubes Used for the Analysis of Gaseous Mercury by Cold Vapor Atomic Absorption Spectrometry

Figure 5

Results of long-term Exp (Exp. no. 4). Amount (ng) of excess mercury measured from the two consecutive blank (the second and third) analyses of adsorption tubes originally loaded with three different amount of mercury (5, 10, and 30 ng). For every standard concentration injection, time gap between first and other (second and third) heating cycles was 1 to 45 days. Each measurement point is the average value of triplicate tube analyses, and a total of nine tubes were used for this analysis. Error bars represent standard deviation of each point (only showing the positive direction). 5 ng (2) (B) represents observation from the second heating cycle in our previous investigation [14].