Direct Spectrochemical Analysis of Solids: A Method for Characterization of Sediments

Techniques for the direct analysis of powdered samples provide an advantageous alternative to methods using wet digestion in sample preparation. The direct spectrochemical methods based on electrothermal vaporization (ETV-ICP-OES, solid-ETV-AAS, etc.) show a great similarity to the classical method of dc arc excitation, used in spectrography. Owing to this, the classical dc arc spectrographical method was used in parallel with ETV methods in the direct solid sampling analysis of river and basin sediments. The calibration procedure is the major difficulty of all techniques applied to direct solid sample analysis because of a lack of suitable reference materials. Consequently, it was necessary to verify the application of model calibration samples, preferentially using the simple dc arc OES system and both spectrographic and spectrometric evaluation. The performance parameters of the methods mentioned are compared with those published for the ETV-ICP-OES and SS-ETV-AAS methods.