Determination Of Impurities In Aluminum Oxide And Two Other Non-conducting Materials By Direct Current Glow Discharge Mass Spectrometry

Direct Current Glow Discharge Mass Spectrometry(DC-GDMS) is developed very quickly these years in high-purity materials component analysis. Generally speaking, the detection limit is one or two orders of magnitude lower than that of Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry(ICPMS). Solid sample introduction is adopted by this method. Compared with wet chemistry, the pretreatment time is shortened and the contamination from reagent and environment is avoided. DC-GDMS has obvious advantages in modern multielement quick analysis of high-purity materials. This technology has very mature application in high-purity metal materials analyses. However, DC-GDMS can not analyse non-conducting samples directly. This is the problem that exists in practical application.In this work, proper metal powder was chosen as host matrix, with which non-conducting powder sample was fully mixed, and then pressed into tablets. The sample could be analyzed by DC-GDMS because of conducting. Graphite powder, copper powder and tungsten powder were tried to be used as conducting host matrix. The advantages and disadvantages were compared and the optimum discharge condition and tabletting condition were explored. The graphite powder was acted as conducting host matrix, mixing with aluminum oxide. Pressing the mixture powder into tablets.The mechanical property of tablets was bad, which was easy to loose. The discharge was not stable and the intensity was poor. The copper powder was chosen as conducting host matrix to detect impurity content in aluminum oxide and high-purity lanthanum oxide powder. The relative standard deviation(RSD) of DC-GDMS results were within54%and35%. The results of DC-GDMS coincided with that of direct current spark atomic emission spectrometry and ICPMS respectively.The copper powder and tungsten powder were used as conducting host matrix, correcting by relative sensitivity factors(RSF) value in instrument software to detect impurities in high-purity yttrium oxide. The result almost coincided with that of ICPMS, except Si and Ca. The RSD was within53%. The tungsten powder was used as conducting host matrix, correcting by corrected RSF that was obtained through yttrium oxide standard substance to detect impurities in high-purity yttrium oxide. The result was more closer to ICPMS result than semiquantitative analysis result. Quantitative determination by DC-GDMS was realized.This experiment in the work indicates that three non-conducting powder materials, aluminum oxide, high-purity lanthanum oxide and high-purity yttrium oxide powder, can be analyzed by DC-GDMS. Quantitative determination can be realized with standard sample. This method provides useful reference for other non-conducting powder materials analysis by Element GD DC-GDMS.