Demountable double-chamber hollow-cathode lamp: a new approach to the determination of trace elements in steel

Abstract

A new type of excitation source for emission spectrochemical analysis of steel has been constructed and studied. The source is a water-cooled demountable hollow-cathode lamp; a tubular sample forms the cathode and can be sputtered from both ends. This yields very low detection limits. The detection limits for the elements studied, aluminium, arsenic, boron, calcium, cobalt, chromium, manganese, molybdenum, niobium, nickel, lead, silicon, tin, titanium and tungsten, were found to be below 1 µg g^–1(except for cobalt and silicon). It was also found that the lamp could be used to determine concentrations of up to several per cent. for some elements and the relative standard deviations were in the range 1–3%. The lamp makes a very interesting complement to the instrumental techniques normally used in steel analysis, X-ray fluorescence and spark source optical emission spectrometry, as the suitability of these for the determination of trace elements is limited.