Development and validation of a method for mercury determination in seawater for the process control of a candidate certified reference material

A simple, robust and reliable method for mercury determination in seawater matrices based on the combination of cold vapour generation and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (CV-ICP-MS) and its complete in-house validation are described. The method validation covers parameters such as linearity, limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantification (LOQ), trueness, repeatability, intermediate precision and robustness. A calibration curve covering the whole working range was achieved with coefficients of determination typically higher than 0.9992. The repeatability of the method (RSD(rep)) was 0.5 %, and the intermediate precision was 2.3 % at the target mass fraction of 20 ng/kg. Moreover, the method was robust with respect to the salinity of the seawater. The limit of quantification was 2.7 ng/kg, which corresponds to 13.5 % of the target mass fraction in the future certified reference material (20 ng/kg). An uncertainty budget for the measurement of mercury in seawater has been established. The relative expanded (k = 2) combined uncertainty is 6 %. The performance of the validated method was demonstrated by generating results for process control and a homogeneity study for the production of a candidate certified reference material.