Direct determination of iron and manganese in wine using the reference element technique and fast sequential multi-element flame atomic absorption spectrometry.

A procedure is proposed for the direct determination of manganese and iron in wine employing fast sequential flame atomic absorption spectrometry and the reference element technique to correct for matrix effects. Cobalt, silver, nickel and indium have been tested as reference elements. The results demonstrated that cobalt and indium at a concentration of 2 and 10mgL(-1) were efficient for quantification of manganese and iron, respectively. Under these conditions, manganese and iron could be determined with quantification limits of 27 and 40microg L(-1), respectively. The proposed method was applied to the determination of manganese and iron in 16 wine samples. The content of manganese varied from 0.78 to 2.89mgL(-1) and that of iron from 0.88 to 9.22mgL(-1). The analytical results were compared with those obtained by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry after complete mineralization using acid digestion. The statistical comparison by a t-test (95% confidence level) showed no significant difference between the results.

A flow-batch internal standard procedure for iron determination in hydrated ethanol fuel by flame atomic absorption spectrometry.

A flow-batch manifold coupled to a flame atomic absorption spectrometer was evaluated to assess the iron content by the internal standard method in hydrated ethanol used as fuel in automotive industry. For this assessment official methods require calibration procedures with matrix matching, making it difficult to obtain accurate results for samples adulterated by the addition of water. Nickel was selected as the internal standard since it is usually absent in samples and because it requires similar conditions of atomization. After procedure optimization, which requires about 4.25mL of sample and standard per measurement, it was possible to get linear analytical response for iron concentrations between 0.12 and 1.40mgL(-1) and a detection limit of 0.04mgL(-1). Eighteen samples were collected randomly from fuel stations in Pernambuco (Brazil) and iron concentration was determined using the proposed procedure. Comparison of results obtained (0.20-1.50mgL(-1)) showed a mean standard error of 3.9%, with 3.8% and 2.3% calculated for the mean variation coefficients of the proposed method and the reference procedure, respectively. For adulterated samples (0.12-0.64mgL(-1)), the mean standard error was 4.8% when compared with the standard addition method. These results allowed concluding that the proposed procedure is adequate to accomplish the determination of iron in ethanol fuel in a large scale basis with a sampling rate of about 10h(-1).