Why DMA-80

The importance of mercury determination

While the total amount of mercury on the planet has remained constant, the amount released into the biosphere has dramatically increased over the past century. Emissions from fossil fuel combustion (such as coal and oil-fired power plants) are responsible for generating the greatest amounts of mercury into the atmosphere, where it is then precipitated into the food chain through soil contamination and bioaccumulation in fish and animal tissue.Other contamination sources include medical and hazardous waste incineration, industrial (paint, pesticides, batteries, paper) waste, and even broken thermometers and manometers.
The hazards of mercury contamination make accurate detection extremely important. While traditional Cold Vapor methods work well, they are difficult, highly time consuming, and generate their own kinds of hazardous waste.
Another method needed to be developed that would generate accurate and repeatable results quickly, simply, and waste-free.

Introducing the DMA-80

Milestone’s DMA-80 Direct Mercury Analyzer effortlessly analyzes liquid and solid samples with no sample preparation and no waste disposal. Automatically process 40 samples in about 4 hours, start to finish. An intuitive controller uploads sample weights, controls the analysis and processes data with built-in report generation and networking capabilities.

Automatic mercury determination in liquid samples with quartz sample boats

Milestone has developed special high purity quartz boats to enable the DMA-80 to carry out precise and reliable analysis of liquid samples. Quartz boats have virtually no ‘memory’ effect and assure improved reproducibility and longer lifetime.

• Automatic analysis of up to 40 liquid or solid samples
• Lower memory effect and better reproducibility than with metal boats
• Quartz boat volume up 1500 µl

Quartz boats typical reproducibility

Direct Hg determination in solids and liquids

Standard mercury methods like Cold Vapor involve lengthy sample pretreatment that can involve a digestion and/or chemical oxidation followed by chemical reduction of the mercury to its elemental state.Sample preparation can take several hours and the reagents involved must be disposed of according to strenuous guidelines for solid and hazardous waste.
The thermal decomposition technique employed by the DMA-80 analyzes samples directly, eliminating digestion, chemical pretreatment and waste disposal.