Determination of arsenic, antimony, bismuth, tin and lead in high purity copper by coprecipitation separation/ICP-MS

The determination of trace amounts of As, Sb, Bi, Sn and Pb in high purity copper using ICP-MS has been investigated. One gram of sample was dissolved with 8ml of 7 M nitric acid. After lanthanum solution (La: 10 mg) was added, the pH of the sample solution was adjusted to 910 with 0.3 M ammonia water and As, Sb, Bi, Sn and Pb ions were coprecipitated with lanthanum ion as their hydroxides. After filtration, the precipite was dissolved with hot nitric acid and diluted to 20 ml with water. As, Sb, Bi, Sn and Pb were determined by ICP-MS. The respective detection limits were 0.04 (As), 0.01 (Sb), 0.008 (Bi), 0.01 (Sn) and 0.02 (Pb) ng ml-1 and the relative standard deviations were less than 2.5% at 100 ng of analyte.