Determination of antimony in water, beverages, and fruits

• Author / Creator

  Xia, Yunlong

• Antimony is naturally occurring in the environment. The assessment of human exposure to environmental antimony is limited. This research focuses on the determination of antimony in water, beverages, and fruit.
  First, we explored whether there is a correlation between arsenic and antimony in water samples with a wide range of arsenic and antimony concentrations. The results showed absent correlation.
  Second, we determined antimony concentrations in bottled beverages including bottled water, soft drinks, juices and alcoholic drinks from Canada. The results showed that the antimony in most of these samples were below the Health Canada Guideline (6 μg/L) for drinking water except one alcoholic drink which contains 7 μg/L antimony.
  Further analysis of lemons and oranges using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) separation and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) detection demonstrated the presence of antimony–citrate species in these fruits, which has not been reported in literature.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • HPLC
  • Beverage
  • Antimony
  • Fruit
  • Arsenic
  • ICP-MS
  • Water

• Graduation date

  Spring 2011

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3R65N

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.