Determination of micro yttrium in an ytterbium matrix by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry and wavelet transform

摘要

In the determination of trace yttrium (Y) in an ytterbium (Yb) matrix by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES), the most prominent line of yttrium, Y 371.030 nm line, suffers from strong interference due to an emission line of ytterbium. In this work, a method based on wavelet transform was proposed for the spectral in-terference correction. Haar wavelet was selected as the mother wavelet. The discrete detail after the third decomposition, D3, was chosen for quantitative analysis based on the consideration of both separation degree and peak height. The linear corre-lation coefficient between the height of the left positive peak in D3 and the concentration of Y was calculated to be 0.9926. Six synthetic samples were analyzed, and the recovery for yttrium varied from 96.3% to 110.0%. The amounts of yttrium in three ytterbium metal samples were determined by the proposed approach with an average relative standard deviation (RSD) of 2.5%, and the detection limit for yttrium was 0.016%. This novel correction technique is fast and convenient, since nei-ther complicated model assumption nor time-consuming iteration is required. Furthermore, it is not affected by the wave-length drift inherent in monochromators that will severely reduce the accuracy of results obtained by some chemometric methods.