Multielement trace determination in high purity advanced ceramics and high purity metals

Abstract

In the field of advanced ceramics two CRMs were developed in the last few years by the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, one for silicon nitride and one for silicon carbide. Besides their application by industry they are appropriate to be used for the validation of special methods used for trace determination in accordance with high purity materials. This is demonstrated, for example, on ultrapure silicon carbide which was analysed by solid sampling electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (SS ET AAS).BAM is also certifying primary pure reference materials used as the National Standards for inorganic analysis in Germany. The crucial point of this project is the certification of the total purity of high purity materials, each representing one element of the periodic table. A variety of different analytical methods was necessary to determine the trace contents of metallic and non-metallic impurities from almost the whole periodic table in the high purity materials. The primary CRMs of copper, iron and molybdenum are used as examples to demonstrate the modus operandi, analytical effects observed by using high resolution ICP mass spectrometry (HR ICP-MS) and the results.