Hyphenation of flow analysis with spectrometric techniques

Quite often one of the biggest problems in analytical methods, including spectrometry, resides in the pre-processing of the sample, which usually must be solved manually. To solve these problems, it can be very useful to request the help of the flow techniques, which will allow to automate the methods, decrease the time of the analysis, decrease the consumption of the samples and reagents, increase the reproducibility, the sample throughput and to work continuously for a long period of time. Between the advantages of the low separation flow techniques are their very high versatility facing the application of various treatment techniques, such as photo-oxidation, pre-concentration, clean-up, derivatization, gas diffusion, etc. Since the entire process is carried out in a completely closed system, results are obtained in a faster and more reproducible way. In this contribution, coupling different low-resolution separation flow techniques with several very selective spectrometric instruments, like ICP–AES, ICP–MS, AFS, etc. Hyphenation with different kind of chromatographic and the capillary electrophoretic techniques is also described.