ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the major atomic spectroscopy techniques and compares their performance characteristics, and in particular examines their respective limits of quantitation for pharmaceutical- and dietary supplement–type samples. Since the introduction of the first commercially available atomic absorption spectrophotometer in the early 1960s, there has been an increasing demand for better, faster, easier-to-use, and more flexible trace element instrumentation. If the requirement is to monitor copper at percentage levels in a copper plating bath and it is only going to be done once per shift, flame atomic absorption (FAA) would adequately fill this role. The sample is aspirated into the flame via a nebulizer and a spray chamber. FAA is predominantly a single-element technique for the analysis of liquid samples that uses a flame to generate ground-state atoms. Electrothermal atomization is also mainly a single-element technique, although multielement instrumentation is available.
