Towards improvement of aluminium assay in quartz for in situ cosmogenic 26Al analysis at ANSTO

Accuracy and precision in the measurement of natural aluminium abundances in quartz can affect the reliability of Al-26 exposure dating and Al-26/Be-10 burial dating. At ANSTO, aliquots extracted from the HF solutions of dissolved quartz are treated in our laboratory, whereas ICP-OES analysis is performed at a commercial laboratory. The long-term inter-run reproducibility of our in-house standards show a limiting precision in Al measurements of 3-4% (1 sigma), which is lower than the claimed precision of Al analysis by ICP-OES. This indicates that unaccounted random errors are incorporated during our aliquot preparation. In this study, we performed several controlled tests to investigate effects of possible inconsistencies and variances during our aliquot preparation procedure. The results indicate that our procedure is robust against any subtle change in the preparation procedure, e.g., fuming temperatures, fuming reagents, and drying conditions. We found that the density of the solutions dispatched for ICP analysis is occasionally variable due to the presence of residual fuming reagents in the solution. A comparison of the results between the calibration curve and standard addition methods show that the former results are consistently lower than the latter by up to similar to 14%. Similar offsets have been reported by previous studies. The reason for these discrepancies is mostly likely matrix effect, which is not accounted for by the calibration curve method. Further tests by varying matrix with impurities such as HF, HClO4, H2SO4 and Si identified that Si could cause lower offset in Al measurements; however, our ICP solutions are confirmed to be free from Si and the cause of matrix effect remains to be investigated. Hence, care must be taken for the measurement of Al concentrations in quartz by ICP-OES, either by ensuring that matrix effect is fully accounted for or by routinely employing standard additions when required. Crown Copyright (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.