Research and application of air mercury measurement based on transverse Zeeman background correction

Mercury is known as a highly toxic metal, which will have a significant health hazard to the human body. To monitor the trace mercury pollution in air, the development of monitoring instruments has been conducted. In this paper the mercury analyzer is developed based on the cold atomic absorption spectrometry theory by exploiting the transverse Zeeman-Effect background correction technology. The experiments have been done to test the performance of the system. At the same time, the same experiments with RA-915 mercury analyzer have been done to compare with the results. First, zero gas was measured for an hour and high concentration mercury sample gas was measured for four days. The results of zero gas shows that the detection limit of the system is 2.19ng/m 3 and the standard deviation is 0.73. The concentration fluctuation is within a tight range of ±1.5ng/m 3 . The results of high concentration sample gas are in good agreement with the results of RA-915, and the correlation coefficient is 0.95. Second, laboratory air was measured for 12 hours. The results compared with RA-915 are in good agreement and have the same variation trend. Additionally, the atmospheric mercury concentration near the non-ferrous metal smelter in Tongling city has been measured by the system and the RA-915. The measurement results from two analyzers have a good linear correlation with correlation coefficient of 0.98 and slope of 1.027. It indicates that the system has accurate background correction ability, low detection limit and is applicable to long-term air mercury on-line monitoring.