Application Notebook-02-01-2013

Mercury is a toxic, persistent pollutant found in many native ores rich in copper, silver and gold. As such ores are processed mercury can be released to the environment.

Single reaction chamber microwave digestion enables a chemist to digest up to 15 different specialty chemical samples simultaneously at temperatures as high as 300 ?C, greatly simplifying the workflow while maintaining superior quality digestions.

Yeast suspensions were dried and analyzed via FT-IR using an automated transmission sampling accessory. Up to six-fold sampling capacity increase may be realized through automation.

The analysis of coal is demonstrated, with specific emphasis on the measurement of Na2O, using a Cartesian geometry energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) spectrometer employing the Fundamental Parameters (FP) approach.

Knowledge of atmospheric ammonia concentrations is important, but ammonia is difficult to measure. We report here on the development of a low-cost ammonia measuring differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) instrument, based on a small sized and low priced spectrograph.

Low concentration natural methanol exists in most alcoholic beverages and usually causes no immediate health threat.

Pharmaceutical samples spiked with several heavy metals were prepared for ICP-MS analysis using microwave digestion following the protocols in proposed USP chapters <232> and <233>. The results of the spike recovery study are discussed.

Confocal Raman imaging opened the door for many applications in Raman spectroscopy and imaging that were previously unavailable for measurement with conventional (non-confocal) Raman methods.

Owing to technological improvements spurred on by the telecommunications boom of the last decade, Raman spectroscopy has become much more accessible to users in all application areas, including agricultural, forensic, pharmaceutical, biomedical, and others.

Although Raman spectroscopy is an excellent analytical tool, Raman signals are often weak and traditional slit spectrometers typically have poor optical throughput, limiting their effectiveness in low light level setups.

Moxtek's ULTRA-LITE X-ray source is a very small self contained X-ray source (X-ray tube and high voltage power supply) for use in portable X-ray applications, such as the handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometers. This note demonstrates that this X-ray source has a stable and repeatable X-ray flux output over time, which is vital for the precision of the calibrated XRF measurements.

The measurement of trace elements is important across a wide variety of materials characterization problems. When measuring small glass fragments collected from crime and accident scenes, forensics experts analyze trace strontium (Sr) and zirconium (Zr) typically unintentionally incorporated into the glass during manufacturing as one point of identification or comparison.

Multiple reflection ATR is ideal for detecting miniscule levels of components in solutions. If one component is volatile, trace analysis can be simplified by allowing the volatile liquids to evaporate.