Evaluation of Advanced NAA and AAS Techniques Against Conventional Techniques for Analysis of Metals in Bauxite Ores

Abstract

Mining, as a whole has the potential to shape and affect economies directly and indirectly. India as a country is endowed with huge reserves of many minerals. The current study focuses on evaluation of the conventional analytical techniques used post mining of bauxite ore against the advanced Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) and Atomic Absorption Spectrometry (AAS) for analysis of its constituent metals. Detection levels of AAS showed the lowest levels of concentration for all metals when compared to wet chemical and NAA results. While this may be attributed to dilution errors associated with AAS, consistency was also observed to be lacking between the two technically superior methods viz. AAS and NAA. Though predictability could be established post statistical deliberations for NAA results of aluminium and titanium using corresponding regression equations of wet chemical analysis, the same was not observed to be desirable for iron quantification by NAA. This may in turn be due to minimal sample losses in wet chemical analysis and the total absence of the same in NAA technique which requires zero handling thus minimizing scope of human errors.