Study of Nanoparticles in a Few Rivers in North East Italy using SP-ICP-MS | Insight Medical Publishing

The use of nanoparticles (NP) has increased in these years. They are used in many fields, for example industrial and commercial sectors. The large employment may compromise the human and the ecosystem health, because the fate/damages/consequences of NP in the environment are still not known. SP-ICP-MS is a fast method and it can be used for a screening of environmental samples, it combines high sensitivity with fast analytical speed. This is a water surface study, few rivers in the North East of Italy are analysed. 3 litres of surface water are filtered with a vacuum pump with membrane by 0.22 μm pore. The filter is put into a test tube with 30 mL of ultrapure water and then sonicated for 20 minutes. The analyses are performed on a SP-ICP-MS NexION 350D Perkin Elmer using Syngistix Software. Transport efficiency and particle calibration are performed with standard gold nanoparticles of 30 nm, 60 nm and 90 nm. The detection limit (DL) is calculated from the analysis of 5 replicates of ultrapure water. The recovery test is made on water surface both spiked and unspiked and it appears to be between 61,8% and 97%. Considering the high dilution of NP in an environmental complex matrix, this study evaluates the efficiency of the concentration via filtration for SP-ICP-MS analysis of nanoparticles of ZnO, CeO2, TiO2, Ag. The results show that the analysis in SP-ICP-MS combined with the filtration enhance the detection sensitivity and the characterization of nanoparticles.