Flow-injection analysis of silicate rocks for total iron and aluminium

A flow-injection method is described for the spectrophotometric determination of total iron and aluminium in silicate rocks. Rock samples are opened up by fusion with a mixture of lithium carbonate and boric acid, the melt is taken up in 1M hydrochloric acid and the resulting solution is used for the determination of both iron and aluminium. The flow system for the determination of iron needs no particular reagents, involving simply measurement of the absorbance of the chloro-complex of iron(III) at 335 nm. The system for aluminium consists of the reduction of iron(III) to iron(II), colour development with Xylenol Orange (XO), destruction of XO-chelates other than that of aluminium by addition of EDTA and subsequent measurement of the absorbance of the aluminium-XO complex at 506 nm. The systems permit semi-automatic, rapid analysis of silicate rocks for iron and aluminium. Results obtained for standard rocks were in good agreement with the recommended values. The precision ranged from 0.1 to 0.9% for iron and from 0.3 to 0.7% for aluminium.