A Comparison of Efficiency of Two Pretreatment Methods for Extracting Heavy Metals from Welding Fume Samples

용접흄내 중금속분석시 전처리 방법별 효율비교

The purposes of this study were to survey types of pretreatment methods adopted by industrial hygiene laboratories in Korea for extracting heavy metals in welding fume samples and to compare performances of two pretreatment methods, the acid extraction and the microwave digestion, in extracting heavy metals contained in the real workplace samples from various welding jobs including arc, argon, and carbon dioxide. A total of 25 analytical chemists in the industrial hygiene laboratories participating the quality control program directed by the Korea Industrial Safety Corporation were interviewed by telephone. For the purpose of comparing performance of extracting heavy metals from real workplace samples, a total of 53 welders from 21 workplaces located in Anyang, Uiwang, and Kunpo areas were sampled from the period of March 22, 1999 to April 20, 1999. It was found that the most frequently adopted method for samples from the quality control program was the acid extraction method(40%) followed by the NIOSH 7300 method(36%). The NIOSH method, however, was the dominant method(36%) for samples from workplace followed by the acid extraction method(28%). In this study, two extraction methods, the acid extraction and the microwave digestion, were compared in terms of recovery rate, accuracy, and precision for both manganese and chromium. Both methods produced comparable results for the samples prepared for the quality control program. In contrast, concentrations of two heavy metals determined from real workplace samples pretreated with the microwave digestion method were statis tically significantly higher, manganese(166%) and chromium (200%), than those of utilizing the acid extraction method. These findings were consistent regardless of types of welding techniques used. The results of this study clearly show the importance of verifying the analytical performances of extraction methods for heavy metals not only for the samples from the quality control program but also from the real world samples collected from welding jobs.