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A New Pretreatment Technique for Environmental Tritium Analysis with Microwave Heating Method

Naofumi AKATA^1,2), Masahiro TANAKA^1,2), Sadatsugu TAKAYAMA¹⁾, Hideki KAKIUCHI³⁾, Toshiya TAMARI⁴⁾ and Saburo SANO⁵⁾

1)National Institute for Fusion Science, 322-6 Oroshi-cho, Toki 509-5292, Japan

2)SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies), 322-6 Oroshi-cho, Toki 509-5292, Japan

3)Institute for Environmental Sciences, 1-7 Ienomae, Obuchi, Rokkasho, Aomori 039-3212, Japan

4)Kyushu Environmental Evaluation Association, 1-10-1 Matsukadai, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka 813-0004, Japan

5)National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, 2266-98 Anagahora, Shimoshidami, Moriyama, Nagoya 463-8560, Japan

(Received 26 November 2015 / Accepted 13 January 2016/ Published 4 March 2016)

Abstract

The conventional method for FWT and OBT analysis is a liquid scintillation counting method after freeze-drying and combustion of the sample. However, pretreatment for FWT and OBT analysis are complicated and time consuming processes over weeks. Thus, we propose the application of microwave heating technique to save time and effort of the pretreatment of plant samples for FWT analysis. To understand the behavior of the combustion and drying of organic samples, we conducted TG/DTA analysis of pine needle samples. It is found that the sample has to be heated up to 100 - 110 ℃ for complete drying under N₂ gas flow condition. Then, we tried the water recovery from fresh pine needle samples by the multi-mode microwave heating system. As a results, it was provided to good recovery yield achieved more than 97% under these experimental conditions. This result shows more preferable for the pretreatment of organic samples by microwave irradiation method than the conventional method.

Copyright (c) 2016 The Japan Society of Plasma Science and Nuclear Fusion Research

Keywords

Tritium analysis, FWT, OBT, microwave, pretreatment

DOI: 10.1585/pfr.11.2405017

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