The Flame

Just imagine that you are swimming in your solution, there are nice solvent molecules all around you and you are suddenly elevated from this environment and carried into a hot flame. What happens there ? All the solvent molecules around vaporize and leave you. There are some oxygen atoms and hydroxyl radicals who want to steal your electrons (if you are not an ion yet and still have electrons which can be stolen), and there are free electrons, atoms, and ions which hit you from all directions. I can assure you that it is an elementary hell in a flame.

At the beginning of atomic absorption spectrometry there was a way to escape much more easily from the flame if you were a member of a larger droplet. The sample was directly injected into the flame and these larger droplets could pass through the flame and exit it still solvated. Nowadays spectrometers use a spray chamber after the nebulizer which stops the larger droplets from entering the flame. The amount of sample that enters the flame is smaller but if you enter you really have only one option: to accept the electron thives (oxygen atoms or hydroxyl radicals) around you. If the temperature is not high enough you can escape unatomized. That's better, even if you are then characterized as being refractory.

Anyway you won't swim again for a while and only God knows what happens to you. And all these things only to atomize the sample and to transform it in an atomic cloud ! Now tell me: isn't it annoying ? And entering the flame isn't the worst thing that can happen to you as atom. Just read about the electrothermal vaporizer (graphite furnace) ! But the thing I hate most is plasma used in emission techniques where temperatures are two or three times greater than in graphite furnace.

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