Indirect Determination of Gold Purity by Measurement of Impurities with Flame Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy

The determination of the purity of scrap and refined gold is a very important procedure for the financial markets, the jewelry business and the electronics industry.

Over the years, the classical fire assay technique has been used for gold determination but this is a very labor-intensive procedure, and prone to many operator errors. Hundreds of books have been written with special steps and secret protocols to follow for accurate and reproducible fire assays; but it still is a subjective method and is sometimes used more for semi-quantitative analyses for those labs without experienced asssayers.