What Can ICP-MS-Based Techniques Do For You?

Inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) is an atomic-based technique that primarily measures elements at trace levels.¹ Although used often in biological analysis, ICP-MS has wider applicability in other areas, such as energy and environmental analysis.

In this “Pathways in Spectroscopy” clip, Ayush Agarwal, a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing in Berlin, provides a brief overview of his doctoral research that centered on ICP-MS-based techniques.² He outlines how ICP-MS can be useful in the energy industry and in environmental analysis.

Spectroscopy: Would you be able to provide a brief overview of your doctoral research that centered on ICP-MS-based techniques?

Ayush Agarwal: During my bachelor's, I was privileged enough to intern at an iron and steel plant, oil refinery, lead acid battery manufacturing company, and a cement factory. In all these experiences, I could see that the concern for energy and the environment was one common thread.

For my higher education that was my master's, I wanted to dive deeper into this topic as a chemical engineer, and then my Ph.D. provided the perfect opportunity because here, the guiding principle was to develop methods for both short-term and long-term energy problems. Our current economy is based on carbon-based energy, and using renewable fuels like biogas is a real solution for the short-term transition period.

One of the projects that I focused on was on quality control of biogas. Biogas is produced from rotting biowaste or biomass, which can contain many different types of impurities. I focused on working and developing methods for quantifying siloxanes, which are some silicon-containing compounds and condensable sulfur compounds in biogas. I worked on developing the sampling and the analysis, and the analysis was performed using combination of gas chromatography (GC) with an ICP-MS instrument. With the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and computational chemistry, we are at a point where we are discovering materials faster than we can characterize them, so when you synthesize new nanoparticles for catalytic or any other applications in the laboratory, microscopy is the way you go and characterize them, but there are certain issues with it.

First of all, in electron microscopy, it's a very slow and time-consuming process. The second thing is that you can only observe a certain number of particles at a time. And the third, and my biggest concern, is that we as human beings are all about getting those perfect, beautiful images, so that inherently introduces some biases in the analysis. For my Ph.D, I worked on developing hyphenated scanning and mobility particle sizing with an ICP-MS instrument. What that does is that it gives you the size result and the elemental analysis of nanoparticles.

For my Ph.D, I also implemented shape factor correction for multiple charges because when the particles are analyzed using this technique, it gets some static charge on it, so it gives you a really high throughput characterization, and the microscopy can then be freed for some other work. As a result, if you're doing routine analysis, this technique can really free up your resources and time.

References

1. Wilschefski, S. C.; Baxter, M. R. Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry: Introduction to Analytical Aspects. Clin. Biochem. Rev. 2019, 40 (3), 115–133. DOI: 10.33176/AACB-19-00024
2. LinkedIn, Ayush Agarwal. LinkedIn. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayush09/ (accessed 2026-04-13).