Methods and Procedures for the Determination of Antimony as an Environmentally Important Analyte
Keywords:
antimony, electroanalysis, spectrometry, chromatography, environmentAbstract
This review describes the features, importance and current state of analytical techniques used for the determination of antimony based on separation, optical, static and dynamic electrochemical principles. Antimony is an environmentally important element coming from industrial activities as well as from eroded deposits of metal ores. It may enter food chain and have toxic effects on human; hence its monitoring is necessary today. The most common analytical technique for the detection is atomic absorption spectrometry, which is however quite expensive. Therefore, novel techniques based on electrochemistry are being developed, because they are cheap, fast, and do not involve any complicated sample pretreatments.