A wide range of materials based on fluorinated organic compounds with highly desirable properties has been created during the last decades and their amount is constantly growing. The consequence of the accelerating production of fluorinated organic substances is their increased occurrence in the environment. Besides the known substances, further toxic fluorine species can occur due to decomposition or microbial degradation. The determination of single compounds is time-consuming and cost-intensive. Therefore, a sensitive screening method of fluorinated organic compounds as sum parameter enables a fast monitoring of the environmental pollution. The presented method of the quantitative can determine TOF as sum parameter in waste waters. TOF is evaluated by the molecular absorption of gallium monofluoride (GaF) using Graphite Furnace HR-CS MAS. The boiling points of different Florine species play an important role of TOF analysis. Furnace program optimization and calibration strategy are fully discussed for achieving the species-unspecific response of different fluorinated organic compounds. The limit of detection was 4 µg/L of F. The recovery rate of a synthetic waste sample which contained 24 fluorinated organic compounds, was 99.69%.
Dr. Siqi Sun obtained her Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry at University of South Florida in 2017. Right after graduation, she joined Analytik Jena US as the Application Scientist for Analytical Instrumentation. She led the application research for the North American market. She is the voting member of American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Committee D02 on Petroleum Products, Liquid Fuels, and Lubricants and D19 on water.