Borosilicate glass is often preferred due to lower cost and general availibity. Quartz glass. The sampling of total gaseous mercury is usually done using gold traps with gas meters or mass flow controllers for air volume measurement. During the last few years, automated instruments for sampling and analysis of mercury in air have been made available.The automated method applies the same basic principles as the manual method and has been shown to generate comparable results. For details consult : https://www.ospar.org

gold traps and subsequent atomic fluorescent spectroscopic approach is well established method apart from automated analyzer available now a days

For Hg in air, there are two different methods :

1-passive methods based on gold tramps and analysis with different equipments.

2-active methods based on direct Hg equipment such as Lumex or Tekran.

Please Refer:

Sampling and analysis for a atmospheric chapter 10-5, center for environment Research Inf office of Research and development. 1999. US Environmental Protection agency. Cinchinoti OH 45268.

If you are measuring mercury in air to check concentrations are not above occupational exposure limits (typically 20 - 50 ug/m3), then it is easiest to use a portable mercury analyser (Lumex, NIC or Jerome are examples of these).

If you need to measure trace concentrations, perhaps for research or for trend monitoring purposes, then trapping onto a gold based trap or sulphided carbon trap followed by determination of the mercury in the trap by a technique like AAS or AFS is most appropriate. You can get automated samplers that will record the volume of air sampled through a trap over a long period of time to allow very low concentrations (ng/m3) to be quantified.

If you would like any further information on either of these two methodologies don't hesitate to get in touch.

I agree with what many people here have already mentioned in this thread. The Tekran 2537B is a proven method for measuring trace levels of atmospheric Hg over long periods of time and can even be deployed in remote areas. I believe the newest models allow for remote downloading of data although these instruments will cost you a substantial amount of money. Using this approach, you can have minute resolution data that measures as low as 0.1 ng m-3 reliably. I have used this in concert with borosilicate glass reactors to measure microbial Hg reduction at very low levels and they can also be reprogrammed to sample for longer periods of time if need be:

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The only drawback I will say is that these instruments are very sensitive to moisture + particulates and great care needs to be taken in maintaining them. That being said, the Tekran staff are amazing and very helpful.

On another note, I would also recommend using a passive air sampler as they can be much more cost effective. My colleague David McLagan is an expert on such matters and has recently published an article discussing the use of this approach:

Article Characterization and Quantification of Atmospheric Mercury S...

If you have any more questions please don't hesitate to get in touch with me, I am always happy to help a fellow mercury scientist!