Rapid Multielemental Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectrometric (ICP-AES) Method for the Assessment of the Quality of Flower Waters

Flower waters, also known as aromatic waters, hydrosols, or herbal distillates, are typically considered to be by-products of essential oil. However, because of their bioactive content, flower waters currently exhibit various applications in the food industry as flavoring agents and food sanitizers. In this study, inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) was employed for the assessment of the elemental composition (i.e., Ag, Al, B, Ba, Ca, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, Ni, Pb, and Zn) of several flower waters. The reported method was optimized and validated in terms of linearity, limits of detections (LODs), limits of quantifications (LOQs), accuracy, and precision. The relative recoveries of the proposed method were between 80.0% and 120.0%, while the relative standard deviation values were less than 9.8%. The LODs and LOQs of the ICP-AES method ranged between 0.8 mu g L-1(Cr) - 73.5 mu g L-1 (Al), and between 2.5 mu g L-1 (Cr) - 245.0 mu g L-1 (Al), respectively . The validated ICP-AES method was successfully employed for the analysis of a variety of flower water samples.

Automated summary

Flower waters, considered by-products of essential oils, have various applications in the food industry due to their bioactive content. This study utilized ICP-AES to assess the elemental composition of several flower waters, with an optimized and validated method.