A MICROWAVE PLASMA CAVITY ASSEMBLY FOR ATOMIC-EMISSION SPECTROMETRY

Although inductively coupled plasmas (ICPs) are widely used for multie lement analysis microwave induced plasma (MIP) offers a great potentia l for a variety of applications. Modifications to incorporate MIP into commercial ICP direct reading spectrometer systems have been develope d. A direct reading echelle spectrometer is described which opens new possibilities for the successful construction of commercial MIP-AES sy stems with the potential to run all of the typical methods worked out for earlier ICP-AES applications. Use of flow injection techniques and automation to couple with in situ concentration will likely offer a f urther improvement in the analytical performance of this system. Due t o the capabilities demonstrated by this spectrometer it appears that h ybrid instruments will be increasingly important for future developmen ts in optical spectrometry. This is particularly true for very demandi ng areas such as atomic emission spectrometry. The system could be rea dily commercialized.