Determination of cobalt in pharmaceutical and biological samples

Microwave digestion coupled with graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (GF-AAS) was utilised for cobalt determination from pharmaceutical and biological samples (hair, nails, blood and urine). Standard calibration curve for cobalt was constructed by plotting absorbance against concentration, in the range 0.1-10 mu g/L, R=0.9990 for GFAAS determination and a good linearity being observed. To check the validity of the proposed method, the results obtained by GF-AAS were compared with the results obtained by AdSV for samples which contain cobalt in higher quantity than the limit of detection of the voltammetric method and also the standard addition method was applied.