The Impact of Flow Injection on Modern Chemical Analysis

There is no doubt that Flow Injection Analysis (FIA) has had a profound impact on the ways and means that modern analytical chemical procedures are performed. This is amply reflected in the voluminous scientific literature, which by the middle of 2004 passed more than 14,500 FIA-publications in international periodicals, to which should be added a couple of dozens monographs plus several hundreds Ph.D. theses. This wealth of publication activity clearly reflects that not only has FIA given birth to numerous ingenious methods and novel applications, but quite a few of them have, in fact, allowed to implement procedures which previously were difficult or, actually, impossible to execute by conventional means. Clever examples are exploitation of bio-or chemiluminescence, methods relying on kinetic discrimination schemes, assay of metastable constituents, or the use of on-line separation and preconcentration procedures. In recent years, FIA has been supplemented by Sequential Injection Analysis (SIA) and the Lab-on-Valve (LOV) approach. Following a brief historic introduction and an account of the impact of FIA in academia, the lecture will describe these two new generations of FIA, accompanied by selected examples, emphasis being placed on the determination of trace-level concentrations of metal ions in complex matrices with detection by ETAAS and ICP-MS.