Background

Global copper supply and consumption has been growing in the past few decades. Copper is one of the important base metals for development of modern nations and it plays a significant role as an essential industrial material for construction, electronics, machinery, transportation and so on. Copper ore and copper concentrate, which are mainly sulfide, contain a variety of minor elements, which are valuable elements as byproducts, or harmful to quality in copper metal products and hazardous to environment and human health. Therefore, rapid and accurate determination of various metals of major and trace amount in copper ore and concentrate is important for process control in the beneficiation and smelting of copper. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry is the best analysis method to monitor ore grade and impurity with high precision, accuracy and rapidity. The fusion method is an effective sample preparation technique for accurate analysis of a wide variety of powder samples including minerals and ores by XRF spectrometry since it eliminates heterogeneity due to grain size effects and mineralogical composition. In order to take advantage of the fusion method, however, appropriate corrections for errors arising from fusion processes are required. Possible errors in the fusion process are weighing inaccuracies, loss on ignition (LOI), gain on ignition (GOI), decomposition of oxidizing agent and evaporation of flux. This application note will introduce an advanced correction technique for fusion method and application for copper concentrate analysis.