Sulfhydryl Cotton Enrichment Separation-Determination of Silver in Geological Samples by ICP-MS

A rapid and inexpensive method was developed for the determination of trace silver in geological samples by using sulfhydryl cotton coupled with ICP-MS. The interferences such as $^{90}Zr$, $^{92}Mo$ and $^{93}Nb$ on silver were investigated in detail. Sulfhydryl cotton was found to be an effective adsorbent for separation of interferences for Ag in the solutions. Excellent agreements with the certified values were obtained for all the certified reference materials. The memory effects of Ag by ICP-MS were examined by using different agents, including water, nitric acid, and HCl-thiourea to all standards/samples. The agents also acted as cleansing solutions. A combination of HCl with thiourea gave the minimum memory effect. For comparison of results, a proposed Chinese Geology Survey procedure DC-ARC-AES and a direct determination pretreatment method of ICP-MS (water bath- auqa regia digestion) were studied. Under optimal conditions, the detection limits of our method for $^{107}Ag$ and $^{109}Ag$ were 1.2 ng/g and 1.3 ng/g, which offered much better accuracy for some difficult analysis geological samples such as GBW07604, GBW07605.