Analysis of Halogens in Foods - Application Report

Halogens are a group of reactive elements that play an important biochemical role in living organisms as there are some forms of elements such as Cl and I that are essential for humans, while others such as Br could be toxic and cause cell damage. This is the main reason why this group of elements has been extensively studied in food and biological materials.

The sample preparation step and subsequent determination of halogens by ICP is a challenging analytical task with problems related to analyte losses and contamination plus interference caused by residual carbon in digested solutions.

The Milestone UltraWAVE microwave digestion system from Analytix overcomes all the above and can complete a complete mineralisation of food samples using a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and alkaline solution. Tests show that the ability to reach a digestion temperature of 250°C is crucial to obtain the proper quality of digestion and ensures a reliable analysis of halogens especially for Iodine. Other important advantages of this method are the formation of water as a product of digestion and the minimal memory effect of the analyses in ICP by the alkaline pH of the final solutions digested.

The system also offers a much simpler approach than other sample preparation techniques commonly used for this type of analysis and allows digestion of different samples with different sample weights using different media all in the same run so there is no need to batch samples of the same type into separate runs

Contact Analytix for a copy of the application report.