Standards Development

Scope

This standard specifies the methods for determination of cerium in magnesium alloys according to the inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometric analysis (hereafter, referred to as the 'ICP atomic emission spectrometric analysis').

Purpose

Magnesium is the lightest of all the commonly used metals and its alloys have been developed and applied to transport facilities and mobile electric devices because they have the best strength-to-weight ratio of any of the commonly used structural alloys. Recently magnesium alloys including rare earth elements separately have been opened to practice uses, which especially meet the demands for light automobiles.

Magnesium alloys including cerium are the one of the heat resistive and strong alloys at high temperature. Although the chemical compositions of the related alloys have been standardized in ISO 16220 and 3116, there designates no standard describing analytical method to determine cerium therein. The analytical method needs to be standardized in order to keep its quality up for fair and reliable trades.

This proposal concerns with a method using inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES), which is a conventional de facto standard instrument for elemental analysis. Industrial laboratories mostly seem to be ready to use this instrument properly, thus the proposal is suitable for standardization now.

According to the cerium contents designated in the material standards above, the proposed method should fit the concentration range of cerium from 0.10 to 4.6 % mass fraction.