Flow injection analysis of inorganic cationic species in serum and urine.

This paper describes three flow injection analysis (FIA) systems for the automatic determination of sodium, potassium, lithium, calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper and iron in certain biological fluids and compares the results obtained to those of flame photometry and atomic absorption spectrometry. The set-ups were designed to allow the samples to be prepared in the same manner as that used for batch procedures with the same analytical instrument. For determinations requiring a high sample dilution, it was found of definite advantage to split the stream and pass large amounts of liquid through the detection systems. The comparison of the results obtained by FIA and conventional methods yielded correlation coefficients in the range 0.990 to 0.999. The proposed methodology show good precision, with variation coefficients between 0.5% to 5%.