Hydrodynamic chromatography coupled with single particle-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for investigating nanoparticles agglomerates.

Studying the environmental fate of engineered or natural colloids requires efficient methods for measuring their size and quantifying them in the environment. For example, an ideal method should maintain its correctness, accuracy, reproducibility, and robustness when applied to samples contained in complex matrixes and distinguish the target particles from the natural colloidal background signals. Since it is expected that a large portion of nanoparticles will form homo- or heteroagglomerates when released into environmental media, it is necessary to differentiate agglomerates from primary particles. At present, most sizing techniques do not fulfill these requirements. In this study, we used online coupling of two promising complementary sizing techniques: hydrodynamic chromatography (HDC) and single-particle ICPMS analysis to analyze gold nanoparticles agglomerated under controlled conditions. We used the single-particle mode of the ICPMS detector to detect single particles eluted from an HDC-column and determine a mass and an effective diameter for each particle using a double calibration approach. The average agglomerate relative density and fractal dimension were calculated using these data and used to follow the morphological evolution of agglomerates over time during the agglomeration process. The results demonstrate the ability of HDC coupled to single-particle analysis to identify and characterize nanoparticle homoagglomerates and is a very promising technique for the analysis of colloids in complex media.