Determination of Phosphorous, Suplhur, and Silicon Content of Low-alloyed and Unalloyed Steel by Icp-aes After a Unified Wet Chemical Sample Preparation Procedure

Phosphorous, sulphur, and silicon have a great effect on the mechanical characteristics and metallurgical properties of steel. Therefore, it always has been important to know their concentration either in the unalloyed or in the alloyed metal. Using only wet chemical methods their analysis takes much time and labour. The modern instrumental methods make it possible to carry out their determination in a very short time, but the special equipment necessary for that is rather expensive and can be operated efficiently only if there are a lot of samples to be analysed. Inductively coupled plasmaatomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) needs liquid samples, so solid samples must be dissolved prior the analysis. Using this technique, however, one can analyze almost any substance that can be taken into solution provided that there is a suitable sample preparation procedure at the user’s disposal. In this paper, a wet chemical sample preparation procedure is presented, which seems to be suitable for the determination of these important constituents of the steel.