from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Speciation and speciation analysis is currently the subject of research in various domains of science and technology, such as chemistry, metallurgy, materials engineering, medicine and environmental protection, being an important factor in the material and environmental analytics development. Speciation is the occurrence of various physical and chemical forms of a given chemical element, the existence of species in tested material. Speciation analysis helps in identification of those forms and their quantitative marking in a given object. Therefore, assuming with a certain degree of simplification that speciation is the presence of various chemical forms of an element in a sample and the speciation analysis allows for quantitative determination of these forms, similarly in reference to metallurgical samples the notion of phase identification and phase analysis is used including chemical analysis as well. The rule, possibilities and limitations of chemical and electro-chemical phase isolation were also described. Chemical analysis of isolated phases in reference to metallurgy almost always meets the quantitative requirements of speciation analysis. Taking into account the numerous advantages of atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), the role of the method was underlined as significant in research pointing out particularly the applications in determination of chemical composition of intermetallic phases type γ’ in multi-component nickel alloys and carbide phases in tool alloys. The determination of aluminium in steel is also presented with division into aluminium soluble in acids and total aluminium as a classic example of speciation analysis in metallurgy.
Keywords: Speciation, speciation analysis, metallurgy, material science© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.