EAG Scientists Present New Research on Hard Rock Lithium Ore at Nordic Conference

Completely digesting such ores for analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) or ICP-Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES) is time consuming, uses hazardous chemical reagents, and has the potential both introduce contamination and induce the loss of volatile elements in the ore.  In contrast to a typical digestion-solution approach, the two scientists explored using a combination of solid-sampling techniques: Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and Glow Discharge Mass Spectrometry (GDMS).  EAG Laboratories partnered with myStandards GmbH of Kiel, Germany to use their nanopowder lithium ore reference materials in this work.  Methods for applying LA-ICP-MS and GDMS were developed and evaluated using certified reference materials made of lithium pegmatite ore with varying concentrations of lithium and other elements.  You can learn more about this research below, where you can find the conference abstracts for Zipkin’s conference presentation on LA-ICP-MS for major and minor element analysis and Bartov’s poster about trace element analysis by GDMS.  Bartov’s poster and an extract of some slides from Zipkin’s presentation are also available as downloadable documents.