The Rapid Determination of Total Mercury in Health Food by Direct Mercury Analyzer
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Abstract:
An analytical method for rapid determination of total mercury in different forms of functional food is described. The proposed method employed the inner drying, thermal decomposition, catalytic reduction, gold amalgamation and atomic absorption modules of direct mercury analyzer to determine the total mercury of samples. Moreover, the pretreatment of the samples were unneeded during the analytical procedure, which avoided the exogenous pollution and loss of mercury in samples. Two standard curves with different concentration ranges (0~20 ng and 20~800 ng) were established in the method, which exhibited the characteristics of broad detectable concentration range (0~800 ng) and low detection limit (0.06 μg/kg). The developed method was applied in the analysis of total mercury content in six solid and liquid forms of functional food and the analytical results were compared to the commonly used national standard method-atomic fluorescence spectroscopy, which showed that the two methods had no significant difference. Verification on the recommended value of standard reference material showed that this method was accurate and reliable. Recoveries of the samples at three spiked levels (high, medium and low) were in the range of 93.20% to 106.00%. The method was suggested as a ready-to-use analytical method in safety inspection of food and agricultural products.
