ABSTRACT
Atomic emission spectrometry has been associated with the iron and steel industry for a large part of the twentieth century. Atomic emission with an electrical excitation source has several distinct advantages over other techniques that have been applied to the trace analysis of metals. A fixation pair is sometimes used to monitor the stability of the excitation source in arc/spark work since any variation in the concentration ratio is a sign that the energy in the analytical gap has varied. Spark excitation is a high voltage transient pulse applied at high frequency. The trend is toward the concept of global calibration, which drastically reduces the number of needed calibration curves for spark instrumentation. The analytical measurement is an integrated average of the light emission from a rapidly fluctuating process that is not in Local Thermal Equilibrium and, therefore, impossible to model simply, even under idealized conditions.
