Innovative monitoring of atmospheric gaseous hydrogen fluoride

Hydrogen fluoride (HF) is a basic raw material for a wide variety of industrial products, with a worldwide production capacity of more than three million metric tonnes. A novel method for determining particulate fluoride and gaseous hydrogen fluoride in air is presented herewith. Air was sampled using miniaturised 13 mm Swinnex two-stage filter holders in a medium-flow pumping system and through the absorption of particulate fluoride and HF vapours on cellulose ester filters uncoated or impregnated with sodium carbonate. Furthermore, filter desorption from the holders and the extraction of the pentafluorobenzyl ester derivative based on solid-phase microextraction were performed using an innovative robotic system installed on an xyz autosampler on-line with gas chromatography (GC)/mass spectrometry (MS). After generating atmospheres of a known concentration of gaseous HF, we evaluated the agreement between the results of our sampling method and those of the conventional preassembled 37 mm cassette (+/- 8.10%; correlation coefficient: 0.90). In addition, precision (relative standard deviation for n = 10, 4.3%), sensitivity (0.2 mu g/filter), and linearity (2.0-4000 mu g/filter; correlation coefficient: 0.9913) were also evaluated. This procedure combines the efficiency of GC/MS systems with the high throughput (96 samples/day) and the quantitative accuracy of pentafluorobenzyl bromide on-sample derivatisation.