Abstract:
The chemical properties of free radicals are highly active and easy to cause redox reaction of gain and loss of electrons, which is an important factor for the degradation of pollutants in environmental waters. Environmental identification and analysis of free radicals are of great significance to reveal the degradation and transformation mechanism of pollutants in the environment. However, due to extremely low environmental concentration, high reactive activity and short life of free radicals, coupled with the interference of complex environmental matrices, their environmental analysis has been the focus and difficulty of the research. Meanwhile, most studies at present focus on some known free radicals, but there are few studies on the identification of unknown free radicals. In this study, on the basis of systematically summarizing the detection methods and application status of typical radicals, the advantages and disadvantages of different detection methods were expounded, especially for the detection methods suitable for typical free radicals such as hydroxyl free radicals in natural waters. It was proposed that spin capture combined with mass spectrometry, which could simultaneously detect many known radicals and identify unknown free radicals with high specificity and sensitivity, would be the research direction of radical detection in natural waters.