The Analysis of Precious Metals in Mining with the PinAAcle 500 | PerkinElmer
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Application Note

The Analysis of Precious Metals in Mining with the PinAAcle 500

Introduction

When mining for precious metals, ores are extracted from the ground and subjected to various sample preparation procedures in order to remove the metals of interest. A commonly used procedure to isolate metals from the ore is fire-assay, which leaves a matrix-free “button” of the metal. This work focuses on the analysis of precious metals in simulated digested precious metal buttons, and demonstrates the ability of the PinAAcle 500 Flame AA spectrometer to accurately measure low-level gold, palladium, platinum, copper, and silver in matrices which result from the fire-assay preparation of ore samples.