Study of Sediment Samples Using Instrumental Photon Activiation Multi-Elemental Analysis

Abstract Instrumental Photon Activation Analysis (IPAA) has been used in many fields including environmental geochemistry. In the analysis of soil and sediment samples, the sensitivity of IPAA is comparable to that of standard methods such as atomic absorption spectroscopy. A major advantage of IPAA is that minimal sample processing is required and multi-element analyses can be obtained. In this work, the method of Internal Standard Coupled with Standard Addition Method (ISM-SAM) was applied to IPAA analysis of sediment samples. The equation used in ISM-SAM was derived in detail and the relationship between the elemental mass and the gamma peak counts in the measured spectra was established. It was found that accurate results can be obtained even when the sample and the reference are irradiated at different photon fluxes and measured in different geometries. The ISM-SAM equation was refined to better quantify the relationship between the addition amount and the uncertainty. Applying refined ISM-SAM, a sed...