DETERMINATION OF SELENIUM IN SOIL BY HYDRIDE GENERATION AAS

Hydride generation AAS was applied for the determination of total sele nium in soil. The influence of various anions and cations present in t he sample solution on the generation of selenium hydride was investiga ted. Special attention was paid to the wet oxidation procedure for the sample dissolution. The proposed procedure involves microwave sample preparation by using a mixture of H2O2/HNO3/H2SO4. The accuracy of the procedure was checked by the analysis of the standard reference mater ial Buffalo River Sediment (SRM-2704, NIST). Satisfactory agreement of the results obtained with the values reported was achieved. The detec tion limit of the procedure was 25 ng Se/g of soil. The relative stand ard deviation of the measurements varied from 5.5% for SRM-2704 up to 10% for the real soil samples.