Optimisation of sensitivity in the multi-elemental determination of 83 isotopes by ICP-MS as a function of 21 instrumental operative conditions by modified simplex, principal component analysis and partial least squares

The optimisation of the sensitivity in the ICP-MS determination of 83 isotopes, as a function of 21 operative parameters was performed by generating an initial experimental design that was used to define, by principal component analysis, the multi-criteria target function. The first PC, which contained an overall evaluation of the signal intensity of all isotopes, was used to rank the experiments. The modified simplex optimisation technique was then applied on the ranked experiments. The increase in signal intensity was, on the average, 3.9 times for the isotopes considered for the simplex procedure. When finally convergence was achieved, a PLS regression model calculated on the available experiments allowed to investigate the effect played by each factor on the experimental response. Simplex and PCA proved to be extremely effective to obtain the optimisation and to generate the multi-criteria target function: they can be suggested as an automatic method to perform the optimisation of the instrumental operative conditions.