Determination of antimony and tin in tin dioxide whiskers by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry

A procedure for the determination of antimony and tin in tin dioxide whiskers, which were grown from a gas phase by the vapor-liquid-solid mechanism, was developed. The problem was difficult because the single whiskers are irregularly small in size and have a small weight (about 10 −5 g). The procedure is based on the decomposition of a solid sample by cementation on zinc followed by the determination of analytes with the use of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The procedure developed is characterized by the detection limits of antimony of 0.01–0.03 μg/L and an RSD of 10%. An approach was proposed to estimate the antimony content of single whiskers.