Total microwave-assisted digestion of metal-contaminated soil samples

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Yu-Ling Wei and Guan-Wei Ko

Tunghai University, Taiwan

: Expert Opin Environ Biol

Abstract

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It’s usually difficult to totally digest soil samples despite the necessity to reach total dissolution of a soil matrix for the purpose to make any further elemental analysis trustworthy. In most prevailing cases of digesting solid samples, the solid remaining has been filtered and ignored. Therefore, microwave digestion of such kind is usually termed as “acid extraction”, rather than “total acidic digestion”. Both US EPA and Taiwan EPA officially formulated the method of performance-based microwaveassisted digestion. The present study develops a digestion recipe for local soil samples to improve digestion efficiency. Experimental parameters include digestion temperature and type of combined acid used, and the samples are practically completely dissolved in the present study.

Biography

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Yu-Ling Wei completed his PhD from Penn State University in 1985 and has served as a faculty member for Tunghai University of Taiwan since 1987.

Email: yulin@thu.edu.tw