CRM Solutions

Cobalt alloys are commonly used in applications requiring high strength, high temperature corrosion and wear resistance.   Despite their wide use there are relatively few reference materials for this important alloy group.

ARMI is pleased to introduce 2 new certified reference materials for cobalt alloys:  IARM-Co6B-18 a Stellite 6b alloy and IARM-CoElgiloy-18 an Eligiloy^® alloy.   You can download the certificates of analysis on our new product page.  These products are available in three forms; 38mm diameter x 3mm thick disks for XRF, 38mm diameter x 19mm thick disks for optical emission and chips for ICP-OES/MS and AA.

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 One of the most common ways to weld cast iron is by stick or arc welding.   The stick is an electrode covered with flux or filler material. The most common filler material for welding cast iron are nickel alloys.  The chemical composition of the filler material can impact the quality of the weld so it is important to have reference materials to verify the composition.   Reliance Foundry provides a very good discussion of the procedures for welding cast iron in their blog post “How to Weld Cast Iron”.

There are few reference materials available for verifying the chemical composition of welding fillers so we decided create one in collaboration with Special Metals.   This new reference material called IARM-Ni244H-18  and  is based on  a is a nickel-iron-manganese alloy that is used as welding filler material and sold under the commercial name of NI-ROD® 44 Filler Metal.

The IARM Ni244H-18 has 22 major and minor elements certified as well as informational values for an additional 55 trace elements.   The unique major element composition of this alloy (41.1% Ni, 39.9% Fe, 10.9% Mn and 6.9% Cr) make it extremely useful as a sample to extend the calibration ranges for XRF and OE applications as well as a calibration monitor sample.

This reference material is available as  38mm x 3mm disks for XRF, 38mm x 19mm disks for OE or as chips for ICP-OES and ICP-MS applications.  The certificate of analysis for this reference material available for download on our new product page.

Have you seen those YouTube videos showing folks lighting their water on fire as it cascades into the bathroom sink? Pretty scary, huh? In some parts of the world, including the US, people have unknowingly built their homes over large deposits of natural gas. Most of this gas is trapped in layers of shale deep beneath the aquifers that supply their household water. 

Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is a process used to remove the natural gas from the shale layer, harvesting the gas and making it available for the natural gas market. The big question is how did the natural gas get into the household water?

 I am happy to announce the release of our 2018 catalog.  In the past year we have added over 90 new products to our portfolio of certified reference materials as well as increased our line of sample preparation equipment for XRF, OE and ICP.

Developing new reference materials can be a time consuming process often requiring several years to complete. This means that reference material development typically lags well behind the introduction new metal alloys created to meet the needs of  increasingly demanding industrial applications. This disparity creates a problem for chemists working with analytical methods such as XRF, ICP and OE, as these are comparative techniques and require reference materials to calibrate and validate.

 ARMI is pleased to announce the release of 7 new products that cover 5 steel alloy grades.   

The ColdBlock system uses infrared radiation to rapidly digest metal alloy samples and a cooling block to condense out escaping vapors minimizing the loss of volatile elements.  Our preliminary results, detailed in a previous blog post (A New Sample Preparation Technique for  Metal Alloys), looked promising so we are now conducting validation studies with IARM CRM’s of various alloys.  This post details our validation study using CRM IARM 5I, a Grade 316 stainless steel alloy.

Digestion Procedure

5 separate 0.5g aliquots of CRM IARM 5I were prepared using 20ml of aqua regia in a quartz digestion tube.  The 5 digestion vessels were loaded into a 6 position ColdBlock digestion system and digested for 15 minutes at 28% power.  The digested samples were diluted to a total volume of 50ml using deionized water and transferred to a centrifuge tube.  1 ml of HF was then added to each centrifuge tube to stabilize the solution. The samples were then analyzed on a Spectro Arcos ICP-OES in our laboratory.  The results are detailed below.  The reproducibility of each of the 5 digestions is very good, and the average values agree well with the certified values for all elements including Si and volatile elements such as As and S.     We will be posting the resuts of  validation studies on other alloys in the near future so subscribe to our blog to be sure you are automatically notified.

If you would like to learn more about this technology you can visit our product page Learn More

ARMI is proud to release 10 new Nickel alloy CRM's for chemical analysis.   These CRM's have expanded  data for both certified and indicative  elements.