Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES): a Powerful Analytical Technique for Elemental Analysis

ICP-OES is a powerful, versatile, and advanced analytical technique with excellent detection properties. Due to its extraordinary features, it has been widely employed for the analysis of a wide variety of chemical elements in the past few years with great success. It offers the least detection time, lower detection limits, broader linear dynamic range, and greater matrix tolerability as well as negligible chemical interferences. Beyond this, it can handle multiple varieties of samples including aqueous, inorganic, organic liquids, and solids as well. It comprises complex instrumental makeup which enables it to detect up to 2 to 70 elements simultaneously with great accuracy. Recent reports evidenced that this hyphenated technique has been employed in several analytical determinations including food analysis, agricultural investigations, geological studies, drug/metabolite analysis, and environmental and forensic sciences. In the present compilation, a detailed description of the fundamental principles of ICP-OES has been provided along with its various sophisticated functional components. Also, the reported applications of this technique in different fields have been discussed highlighting the basic experimental setups and outcomes by presenting the data as tables. This summarization may be helpful to analysts to get insights into the working as well as performance characteristics of this technique.