Electrothermal Atomisers:

The use of furnaces as atomisers for quantitative AAS goes back to the work of L'Vov that led to the breakthrough of atomic absorption spectrophotometry towards extremely low absolute detection limits. An essence of L'Vov method is to fully vaporise a small amount of analyte sample within a graphite tube furnace and acquired a good concentration of the analyte species in the vapour phase that can be suitably determined. Within electrothermal AAS, graphite or metallic tube or cup furnaces undergo resistive heating to attain temperatures needed for complete atomisation of the analyte. For volatile elements this could be accomplished at temperatures of 1000 K while for more refractory elements the temperatures should be up to 3000 K. Let us learn about the working of graphite furnace as an atomiser.