ABSTRACT
Asingleparticle-inductivelycoupledplasmamassspectrometric(SP-ICP-MS)methodwas established to detect the size distribution and number concentrations of silver nanoparticle ( AgNPs) in dilute aqueous solution. The optimal dwell time was 3 ms to reduce possibility of two or more particles entering into detector simultaneously. An iterative algorithm was applied to distinguish AgNPs as outliers from baseline and dissolved metal ion signal if the measured intensity was beyond five time standard deviation of whole data. Size distribution and number concentration of three commercial silver nanoparticle dispersions ( nominal diameters of 30, 50, 100 nm) were determined using SP-ICP-MS. The result of SP-ICP-MS is accurately similar to the transmission electron microscopy ( TEM) , indicating that SP-ICP-MS is able to size silver nanoparticles. The particle size detection limit is 25 nm and the limit of number concentration is 8 × 104 particles/L in dilute solution. Tap water added with silver nanoparticle was tested to obtain a similar size distribution and number concentration. This method is simple, fast and highly sensitive, which can be used to investigate risk assessment of silver nanoparticle in aqueous environment and monitor silver nanoparticle in drinking water.