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Development of inclusion reference materials and simultaneous determination of metals and non-metallic inclusions by rapid LIBS analysis in steel samples
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Increasingly, steel is becoming a commodity material. Consequently, production is being switched to locations nearer to the sites of extraction of raw materials, generally outside Europe. In order to retain jobs within the European steel sector, products with higher added value and consistent high quality must be produced. Control practices to ensure quality and consistency involve several different analytical techniques to obtain metal and non-metal analysis during and after the process of steelmaking, resulting in high investment and operation costs. Also, some characterisations such as the cleanness of steel are still too time-consuming to obtain results in a time frame short enough for remedial action during production, or are still limited to relatively small sample areas to provide a high level of confidence regarding the results obtained. This project looked into the feasibility of the rapid and simultaneous measurements of metals' chemistry and inclusion characterisation by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). This involved two main tasks: firstly, the development of methods for the fabrication of reference materials with well-defined inclusion population to enable the quantification of inclusion in steel by spectroscopic techniques; secondly, the development of LIBS to enable simultaneous measurement of metals and non-metallic inclusions. Two methods of production of 'inclusion standards' were developed and gave very satisfactory results. The parameters influencing LIBS sensitivity were studied for the detection of low concentration levels; an approach to characterise non-metallic inclusions was tested and validated against SEM-EDX data, which is one of the conventional cleanness characterisation methods, and provided satisfactory results for inclusions with diameters above approximately 10 μn. Faster electronics for the data acquisition were developed that significantly increased the measurement speed of LIBS. A graphical user interface was developed that enabled a rapid visualisation of the LIBS measurements, and some preliminary manipulations on the data. Finally, LIBS-LIF was tested in an attempt to improve further the limits of quantification for trace levels, but no significant improvement was obtained in comparison with LIBS.
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European Commission and Directorate General for Research
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Publication year : 2010
License: All rights reserved ©
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