Fast-response system for signal acquisition and processing in electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry

✍ Scribed by Edwin Allen; Kenneth W. Jackson

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 388 KB
• Volume: 192
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-2670
• DOI: 10.1016/s0003-2670(00)85724-4

✦ Synopsis

An electrothermal atomic absorption (a.a.) spectrometer is modified to allow accurate correlation of absorbance and pyrometrically measured temperature with time. To by-pass the slow electronics of the spectrometer, the signal is fed from the preamplifier immediately after the photomultipier tube to a la-bit A/D converter mounted in a 320K IBM-PC microcomputer. The wall temperature of the graphite furnace, measured with an automatic optical pyrometer, is recorded simultaneously with absorbance by feeding the pyrometer output to a second channel of the A/D board. Fast deuterium-arc background correction is also done. Background-corrected absorbance, background absorbance and temperature are recorded at 60 Hz. A simple algorithm allowed experimental activation energies to be calculated automatically.