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aluminum testing
Moderators: kgudger, bfinio, MadelineB, Moderators
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rhaley
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Sep 02, 2010 8:06 am
- Occupation: student
- Project Question: what technology or equiptment do i need to detect low levels of leeching aluminum from a reuseable bottle
- Project Due Date: april 2011
- Project Status: I am just starting
aluminum testing
I am doing a science project to test how much aluminum is leeched into soda and i need to know how to test for it. can anyone help me
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deleted-71588
- Former Expert
- Posts: 1297
- Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2006 11:47 am
Re: aluminum testing
You have chosen a difficult area to investigate. Anytime you are trying to measure something parts per million or less you have a measurement challenge that ususally results in needing very expensive measurement equipment and extremely well controlled environments. Here is one article on one way this problem has been approached by the beverage industry.
http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLin ... nalCode=AN
As pointed out in this article, this test is an inverse test on how well the lining material is working.
This probably means that different can manufacturers with diferent lining materials used on different batches of cans will introduce a whole set of variables you might not have expected.
Any assay that is looking for elemental aluminum in arbitrary forms will require some spectrographic equipment. There are lots of purely chemical assay methods that will find specific aluminum compounds; however, the extreme number of them that would be required and the ability of them to be accurate down into a few parts per million makes them unusable for quantitative analysis so it really comes back to whether you have access to any spectrographic analysis equipment on whether you are going to be able to deal with this project.
http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLin ... nalCode=AN
As pointed out in this article, this test is an inverse test on how well the lining material is working.
This probably means that different can manufacturers with diferent lining materials used on different batches of cans will introduce a whole set of variables you might not have expected.
Any assay that is looking for elemental aluminum in arbitrary forms will require some spectrographic equipment. There are lots of purely chemical assay methods that will find specific aluminum compounds; however, the extreme number of them that would be required and the ability of them to be accurate down into a few parts per million makes them unusable for quantitative analysis so it really comes back to whether you have access to any spectrographic analysis equipment on whether you are going to be able to deal with this project.
-Craig