Simultaneous determination of tantalum and hafnium in silicates by neutron activation analysis

✍ Scribed by L.Paul Greenland

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1968
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 623 KB
• Volume: 42
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-2670
• DOI: 10.1016/s0003-2670(01)80327-5

✦ Synopsis

Tantalum and hafnium are of great geochemical interest in that they represent parts of the chemically coherent pairs: niobium-tantalum and zirconiumhafnium. Although niobium and zirconium can be determined readily by emission spectrography, there has been a need for a simple and accurate method fol the determination of tantalum and hafnium. This report describes a procedure for simultaneous determination of tantalum and hafnium for application to geochemical studies of silicate rocks and minerals.

Neutron activation followed by radiochemical separations has been applied to the determination of tantalum'-3 and hafniumd-0 in silicates. These procedures require repeated precipitations and solvent extractions which are tedious and timeconsuming and hence not suitable for the analysis of large numbers of samples. KIM AND MEINKE' have described a rapid method for the determination of tantalum by neutron activation but the sensitivity of their method is inadequate for most silicates. Tantalum and hafnium were not determined simultaneously in these studies.