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F. Horak, A. Nagl, St. Smetaczek, K. Föttinger, A. Limbeck:
"Quantitative elemental analysis of surface modified TiO2 nanoparticles via LA-ICP-MS";
Vortrag: 29th Mass Spec Forum Vienna, Vienna, Austria; 20.02.2018 - 21.02.2018.

TiO2 nanoparticles (NP) are widely used in a large variety of consumer products from paints, coatings and plastics to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics as well as substrate for catalyst materials. However, properties of the mentioned NP are closely linked to their composition. An integral part in the characterization of such advanced materials is therefore to determine their precise elemental composition. For this purpose commonly sample pretreatment procedures such as acid digestion, fusion or dry ashing are used in combination with subsequent liquid analysis, which are well established but require a significant amount of sample handling. We propose a novel solid sampling approach which enables quantitative analysis of surface modified TiO2 NP based on Laser Ablation Inductive Coupled Plasma Mass

Doped TiO2 suspensions were spread on a polycarbonate substrate, and ablated after evaporation of the solvent with a NWR213 laser-ablation system hyphenated to a Thermo Fisher iCap Q ICP-MS. Calibration curves from single element as well as mixed element in-house reference material are prepared using a micro-dried-droplet (µDD) method. The obtained results were compared to conventional wet chemical methods.

The presented method proved to be simple in terms of sample handling whilst allowing quick analysis cycles. In addition to quantitative information of the NP composition, statistical information about the homogeneity of the dopant concentration can be achieve due to the smaller sampling size compared to conventional methods.
The µDD method is a versatile approach for the quantification of single particles with varying composition.

LA-ICP-MS, nanoparticle analysis, elemental composition, µ-dried droplets