Inhaltszusammenfassung

Studying environmental fate of engineered or natural colloids requires efficient methods for their sizing and their quantification in the environment. For example an ideal method should conserve its correctness, accuracy, reproducibility and robustness when applied with samples contained in complex matrixes and distinguish the target particles from the natural colloidal background. Because it is expected that large part of nanoparticles will form homo- or hetero-agglomerates when ...Studying environmental fate of engineered or natural colloids requires efficient methods for their sizing and their quantification in the environment. For example an ideal method should conserve its correctness, accuracy, reproducibility and robustness when applied with samples contained in complex matrixes and distinguish the target particles from the natural colloidal background. Because it is expected that large part of nanoparticles will form homo- or hetero-agglomerates when released into environmental media, it is necessary to differentiate agglomerates from primary particles. Until now, most sizing techniques are not fulfilling these requirements. In this study we used online coupling of two promising complementary sizing techniques: hydrodynamic chromatography (HDC) and single- particle ICP-MS analysis to analyse gold nanoparticles agglomerated under controlled conditions. We took benefit of the single particle mode of the ICP-MS detector to detect single particles eluted from a HDC-column and determine a mass and an effective diameter for each particle with the help of a double calibration approach. Average agglomerate relative density and fractal dimension were calculated from these data and used to follow the morphological evolution of agglomerates with time during the agglomeration process. The results demonstrate the ability of HDC coupled to single-particle analysis to identify and characterize nanoparticle homo- agglomerates and is a very promising technique for the analysis of colloids in complex media.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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