A liquid chromatography detector based on continuous-flow chemical vapor generation coupled glow discharge atomic emission spectrometry: Determination of organotin compounds in food samples

A novel liquid chromatography (LC) detector based on continuous-flow chemical vapor generation (CVG)-coupled glow discharge (GD) atomic emission spectrometry (AES) was proposed herein for the simultaneous determination of organotins (OTs) in food samples. OTs were separated on an LC column and converted into volatile gases by the CVG technique. The GD microplasma was used to excite the Sn atoms to generate the special atomic emission lines of Sn at 317.66 nm, which were recorded by a charge-coupled device (CCD) spectrometer. For an injection volume of 1 mL, the linear correlation coefficients (R) were higher than 0.99 in the concentration range from 0.1 to 10 mu g mL(-1). The recoveries of OTs from spiked samples were 70-103%, and the relative standard deviations (RSD) were 0.2-8.7%. The limits of detection (LOD) for the tested OTs, i.e. trimethyltin chloride (TMT) and dimethyltin dichloride (DMTC), were determined to be 0.59 and 0.93 mu g L-1, respectively. The CVG-GD-AES detector can be used to simultaneously determine TMT and DMTC with high sensitivity, in a simple and cost-effective manner. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.