With the increasing use of nanomaterials in a wide variety of products and processes, the need to measure and characterize them has also grown. Single particle ICP-MS (SP-ICP-MS) was developed specifically for metallic and metal-containing engineered nanoparticles (NPs) and is gaining popularity due to its ability to rapidly detect and characterize a large number of particles, determine particle size and size distributions, the particle number concentration in a sample, and the elemental mass concentration of both dissolved and particulate species.
This work demonstrates the importance of dwell times when measuring particle concentrations by SP-ICP-MS with the NexION® Single Particle ICP-MS system. While dwell times from microseconds to milliseconds are available, milliseconds have several disadvantages which could lead to erroneous results when measuring particle concentration.