Analysis of heat-treated steels by spark excitation and glow discharge optical emission spectrometry

Abstract

High-alloy steels, heat treated in different ways, were studied with spark excitation and plane cathode glow discharge methods. The cathode sputtering rate of the steels increases linearly with decrease in hardness of the samples. The influence of the metallographic structure on the intensity of the 165.70 nm line of carbon was considerably reduced by increasing the temperature of the sample to 400–500 °C. It was possible to construct a joint calibration graph for each element with the types of steel examined. The relative standard deviation of the concentration for an unknown heat-treated steel sample was 1–5%, and was not substantially influenced by whether intensities corrected according to the sputtering rate or the relative intensities were used.