Dear all,
I would like to analyse the chemical composition of glasses that I study. One available method would be LA-ICP-MS (laser ablation inductive coupled plasma mass spectroscopy).
Unfortunately, the standard reference material I have available (NIST610) only contains P2O5 up to ~300 ppm and Al2O3 up to ~ 1 mol%. In order to properly calibrate the instrument for my measurement I would need one or several standard materials that contain at least ~10 mol% (~15 wt%) P2O5 and ~25 mol% (~35 wt%) Al2O3.
I didn't find suitable reference materials in the NIST catalogue. Does anyone by chance work a lot with phosphate glasses and knows a suitable reference material?
Why not use an aluminophosphate of known chemical composition (such as a molecular sieve)? This will have high proportions of both Al and P. Or even aluminum phosphate? Obviously not glasses but contain known proportions of the elements in high concentration. Or mix alumina with a stable phosphate (not P2O5) - this again would have high elemental content.
Have you considered looking at GeoReM? You can search the reference standard database by chemistry and content to find out which certified standards you could use. A quick search for Al2O3 with >30% finds many standards (one in particular is NISTSRM97a with 38.8%).
http://georem.mpch-mainz.gwdg.de/chemical_query.asp
Most of these geological or certified standards are in powdered form but you could easily turn this in to a homogeneous glass for LAICPMS using fluxes such as lithium tetraborate which is routinely used for XRF methods or even by fluxless methods.
Thank you for your quick replies. I didn't know the GeoReM database yet and it shall be very helpful with such research. Also the possibility of just using aluminium phosphate as a standard sounds good and straightforward. If I manage to compact such a powder material it might just work.