Establishment of the simplified method of mercury-copper amalgam distillation for thermal neutron activation analysis of mercury

In order to know the background concentration of mercury in biological samples, a quantitative method was established by using the technique of mercury-copper amalgam distillation for thermal neutron activation analysis. One of the advantages for this technique is the use of "copper broom" which was made by bundling 50 pieces of copper wire (0.2×50 mm). The other is that mercury was distilled and recovered by heating the Hg-Cu broom in a Pyrex glass tube (5 mm in φ, 7 mm ex φ, 30 cml, one of the ends being closed). It was possible to recover quantitatively 40 mg of carrier mercury in 10 ml of a sample solution with 3-4 bundles of Cu broom. It was found that this method was available for a sample of low mercury concentration. As a result of application to a human venous blood, the value of 23.2 ppb of mercury was obtained by using 0.5 ml of the blood.