Determination of Major and Trace Elements in Two New Environmental Reference Materials Using Neutron Activation Analysis

This research work was conducted for elemental characterization of two new reference materials (RM) (CGL-208: Coal fly ash and ISE-860: Sediment) and also to study accuracy and repeatability of elemental data obtained by research reactor-based neutron activation analysis (NAA) technique. For quantification of the elements by NAA, Samples, along with the certified reference materials were irradiated in rabbit irradiation facility of 3 MW TRIGA MARK-II research reactor of Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC) and Gamma -ray spectrometry of the irradiated samples was performed using high-resolution HPGe detector system at NAA laboratory of BAEC. In this study, the quality of the analyses was evaluated by analyzing certified reference materials IAEA-SL-1 (lake sediment) and NIST-1633b (coal fly ash) with repeated analysis (n=4) of each standard, the accuracy and repeatability of the data obtained were evaluated based on two statistical calculations (zeta-score and U-score), and were observed to be good enough for the analytical scheme to be applied to similar sorts of environmental/geochemical samples.

• Supervision