Instant Monitoring of Aluminum Chemistry in Cells Using a Portable Liquid Metal Analyzer

摘要

A portable analyzer for monitoring the aluminum chemistry in production cells is presented. With the portable battery-powered device, trace element concentration analysis can be obtained within 45 s of manually extracting a liquid metal sample from the cell. The device uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to directly analyze the composition of the liquid metal, down to concentrations of approximately 10 ppm for a range of elements. We compare the performance of the portable analyzer with conventional off-line laboratory analysis of cast process samples. In addition to the significant time savings and reduced chance of human error, we show that direct analysis in the liquid metal is particularly advantageous in the case of trace elements that display significant segregation upon solidification, such as silicon.