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A method of microwave digestion technique-flame atomic absorption spectrometry was proposed to determine the total contents of Cu, Zn, Pb, Cd, Cr and Ni in five different kinds of waste bag filters from a steel plant. The digestion effects of the six acid systems on the heavy metals digestion were studied for the first time. The relative standard deviation (RSD) of the method was between 1.02% and 9.35%, and the recovery rates obtained by standard addition method ranged from 87.7% to 105.6%. The results indicated that the proposed method exhibited the advantages of simplicity, speediness, accuracy and repeatability, and it was suitable for determining the metal elements of the waste bag filter. The results also showed that different digestion systems should be used according to different waste bag filters. The waste bag filter samples from different production processes had different metal elements content. The Pb and Zn were the highest in the waste bag filters, while the Cu, Ni, Cd and Cr were relatively lower. These determination results provided the scientific data for further treatment and disposal of the waste bag filter.

A new method for noise removal from signal by the wavelet transform was developed. Compared with analytical signal, noise has higher frequency and smaller amplitude. By the new wavelet filtering method, the high frequency components were first removed, and then the small ones in the remaining transformed vectors were discarded. The proposed approach was evaluated by the processing of simulated and experimental noisy ICP-AES spectra. Different amounts of noise were added to a Gaussian peak to obtain a series of noisy ICP spectra. The simulated noisy spectra with R (signal to noise ratio) = 6 and N (data number) = 51, and with R = 6 and N = 17 were used to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method. The performances of noise removal by the wavelet smoothing, the wavelet denoising and the proposed technique were compared. It was found that using the new approach, the relative errors of peak height would be no more than 5% for spectra with normal sampling points and R > or = 2. Moreover, the baseline could be easily defined, which was helpful to the accurate measurement of peak height. Experimental spectra of Al and V at low concentrations were processed by the proposed method. Intense noises were efficiently removed and the spectra became smoother without underestimating the analytical signal. The distortion of V 303.310 nm line was substantially rectified. The linear correlation coefficients between the peak heights in the reconstructed spectra and the concentrations were found to be 0.9953 for Al and 0.9836 for V, respectively.