Comparison of Spectrophotometry, FAAS and ICP-OES Methods for the Determination of Trace Iron in Solar Glass

Abstract

Solar glass of low iron content plays an important role to increase the optical absorption of solar cells. The national standard stipulates the iron content in the glass without specified testing method. In this paper, we conducted three parallel analytical methods (1,10-Phenanthroline spectrophotometry, FAAS and ICP-OES) to determine the iron content in the same glass and evaluated the results in terms of detection limit, accuracy and precision. Although all three methods can detect the existence of iron, the analytical results are different to some extent. At last we propose a preferred method for commercial solar glass monitoring.