Spectrochemical Analysis of Trace Impurities in Copper Using Copper Fluoride as a Carrier-Distillation Agent

Abstract

A comprehensive study has been made of the efficiency of copper fluoride as a carrier for the quantitative determination of more than thirty impurities in high purity metallic copper. Although other halides of copper and silver have been shown to improve the sensitivity of their detection, copper fluoride was found to be by far the most versatile and effective. The carrier is added directly to the metallic sample, making the method both simple and unusual. The line intensities of the impurities are apparently independent of the size of the copper sample and dependent only on the quantity of impurities present, a fact which greatly simplifies both calibration and analysis. The limits of detection range down to 10 ppb and are lower than those reported by other spectrographic methods in a number of cases. The results obtained for 15 different elements gave a coefficient of variation of 6.5% on 15 replicate samples. Since extremely pure copper fluoride is vital, a simple method for its preparation is described.