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Column Chromatography

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Leaf litter was collected on a hike through the Christopher Creek area in Payson, Arizona. Small amounts of this biomass will be burned at a time. The resulting aerosols will be collected through a drier vent attached to a high volume air sampler. Burn aerosols will be collected on hydrochloric acid-cleaned cellulose filters. Acid-cleaned cellulose filters are commonly used when performing trace metal analysis on aerosols because they dissolve easily in concentrated acid and are cost effective. Filter cleaning and sample preparation will follow the procedure outlined in Mead, et al. (2013). [1] A quarter of each of these filters will be dissolved in concentrated nitric and hydrofluoric acid using microwave digestion. This technique uses high temperature and pressure to dissolve metals in acid for further analysis. This method also removes silica and organic matter from the resulting solution. However, it is difficult to digest black carbon (soot), so the samples often must be digested repeatedly in order for the samples to completely digest. These samples will then be analyzed for trace metal concentrations using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Trace metal analysis is most commonly …show more content…

This column chromatography is a common practice used in isotope geochemistry to isolate the desired analyte in a sample, reducing noise and increasing sensitivity. After this separation and purification, the samples will be analyzed for Fe isotopes using multiple collector ICP-MS (MC-ICP-MS). This instrument is commonly used to measure isotopic composition because it can quantify up to nine masses at once. This limits the effect of instrument variation in biasing isotope measurements. Using sample-standard-bracketing allows us to correct for instrumental drift that can cause over- or underestimation of the amounts of each

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