BORON AND COBALT QUANTIFICATION IN INCOLOY BY ICP-OES USING FIRST-ORDER MULTIVARIATE CALIBRATION

DAMIÁN PIUSELLI; SILVANA MARTIN; JORGE MAGALLANES; DIEGO ARIEL ONNA; EZEQUIEL MARTIN MORZAN

Simposio; 15th Rio Symposium on Atomic Spectrometry; 2019

Incoloyis an iron, chromium and nickel alloy widely used in the nuclearindustry as a material for fuel rods. As this material has excellentmechanical properties, resistance to corrosion and its elements havea low neutron capture cross-section (NCCS), which does not interferewith the neutron balance within the nuclear reactor core. However,impurities in the alloy with high NCCS affect the reactorperformance. Also, trace elements, that produce high irradiationactivities, hinder the management and waste disposal. Therefore,several impurities must be quantified in this matrix, such as boronand cobalt. In a routine determination by ICP-OES, all the emissionlines of boron and cobalt are severely interfered by the emission ofiron, chromium and nickel, applying a traditional univariate analysisfor these analytes in Incoloy is not possible.Thiswork presents a chemometric alternative to solve these spectralinterferences. A central composite design was performed using asvariables the three major elements and the two analytes of interest.The spectral windows for boron and cobalt were extracted, anddifferent first order models were evaluated comparing figures ofmerit obtained by three multivariate calibration methodologies offirst order: multivariate linear regression (MLR), principalcomponents regression (PCR) and least partial squares (PLS). Basedon comparison of figures of merit, PLS methodology is the mostfavorable as present the lowest mean square prediction errors. Themodels were tested analyzing certified reference materials, findingno significant bias. Five samples of Incoloy were measured by theproposed methodology and ICP-MS and no significant differences werefound, with 95% confidence. In conclusion, the present work shows apractical data analysis that solves the quantification of boron andcobalt in incoloy alloys.p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2 }p.western { font-size: 11pt; so-language: pt-BR }p.cjk { font-size: 11pt; so-language: ja-JP }p.ctl { font-size: 11pt }a:link { color: #0563c1 }a.ctl:link { font-family: "Times New Roman" }