Mercury Analysis in Water – How to Prepare Your Reductant

Posted by: chrisball | Posted on: March 21st, 2012 | 0 Comments

Very often I hear users complaining about things like “why does my Hg signal keeps going down”, “unstable signal” or “the background is too high or too noisy”, they could be all coming from one source — your reductant. You probably haven’t prepared your reductant correctly. If your gas liquid separator is turning white or even yellow which means you are almost definitely doing it wrong. A key point of preparing the reductant is to boil Ti(II) chloride in concentrated hydrochloric acid so that it can dissolve properly. After boiling, the solution should be diluted with deionized water then purge with argon, for the best results, overnight.