Abstract :
The direct reading spectrometer has in recent years been widely adopted as an analytical tool in the manufacture of metallic alloys. So far the read-out of such instruments has normally been in arbitrary units and the concentrations of the constituent elements have had to be determined by referring the instrument output to graphs or tables. Various methods of converting measured intensities into actual concentration readings automatically have been devised, but have not gained wide acceptance in industrial circles, where reliability and simplicity are of great importance. This paper describes the development of a method which employs diode function generators to cater for the non-linearity of the calibration curve of the spectrometer and is considered to have high inherent reliability. Capacitor storage devices are used in auxiliary circuits to enable corrections to be made to the output for third element interference effects.
