ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a detailed description of the fundamental principles, together with method development optimization procedures and the operational requirements of the technique. For most inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) applications, a sample is delivered to the instrument's plasma in the form of an aerosol. This technique combined the energy of argon-based plasma with an optical spectrometer and detection system capable of measuring low-level emission signals, which allowed laboratories to perform rapid, automated, multielement analyses at trace concentrations. The success of the technique itself can be measured by the fact that more than 50,000 ICP-OES instruments have been installed between 1983 and 2016, which has resulted in approximately 59,000 publications, with more than 28,000 published since 2012. Elemental analysis by ICP-OES relies on the emission from excited atoms and ions within a sample. Excitation, and subsequent emission, occurs when a species' absorbed energy from the plasma is released in the form of wavelength-specific photons.
