Abstract
The most of chemical methods for determination of mercury in gas camprises of collection of mercury from large volume of gas and of estimation of the amount of mercury collected.
Dithizone method seems to have many merits for determination of small amount of mercury, but it is interfered by many kinds of impurities. Neutron activation analysis is suitable to the determination of mercury of low concentration because of the high sensitivity. For the development of the method of determination, the radioisotope tracer technique and activation analysis are very useful. Thus, we established the following method and analytical results were compared to those by dithizone method and gas detector tube method. In this method absorbent is saturated chlorine solution and absorption time is 2 hrs. After absorption, 4 ml of conc HNO3aq is added to the absorbent, and the mixture is concentrated to 8 ml, then it is sealed in the quartz capsule. Irradiation is carried out in HTR with neutron flux of 1.2×1011 n/cm2⋅sec for s hrs. After cooling for loo hrs., samples are taken out from capsule and determined by the non-destructive method. The sensitivity of this method is 10-3mg/m3. However the sensitivity can be improved by use of irradiation with higher neutron fluxes and destructive methods.
