A comparison study of chemiluminescence systems for the flow injection determination of silver nanoparticles

The comprehensive study of various chemiluminescence systems (luminol, lucigenin, KMnO4, Mn(IV), Ce(IV) and K3Fe(CN)6) in terms of their applicability to the detection of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) has been carried out for the first time. Among the fourteen systems tested, Mn(IV)-formaldehyde-hexametaphosphate was selected as the optimal for the trace determination of AgNPs. The flow injection chemiluminescence method (FI-CL) based on enhancing effect of AgNPs on Mn(IV) chemiluminescence was developed. It was found that sensitivity of measurements depends on the size of AgNPs as well as the type of nanoparticles coating. Under the optimized conditions, the detection limits for AgNPs size fractions of 10 nm, 40 nm and 100 nm stabilized by sodium citrate were in the range 0.3-2.9 μg L−1, AgNPs size fractions of 40 nm, 60 nm and 100 nm stabilized by polyethylene glycol (PEG) were in the range 2.7-13.3 μg L−1, AgNPs size fractions of 20 nm and 75 nm stabilized by polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) were 20.2 μg L−1 and 24.9 μg L−1, respectively. Repeatability of the results expressed as a relative standard deviation (n = 10) was ≤3.3%. The developed method is simple and offers high sample throughput (150 samples per hour). The accuracy of the method was confirmed by analysis of the reference material RM 8017. The method was successfully applied to the direct determination of trace amounts of AgNPs in spiked natural mineral and tap water samples. The recoveries of AgNPs were in the range of 96.8-102%.