Radiochemical Neutron Activation Analysis of Trace Potassium in Rock Samples-Revisited

For the determination of trace K in geological and cosmochemical samples, a simple and effective procedure of radiochemical neutron activation analysis is presented. Although this procedure is essentially based on a previous report by Ebihara, it has been extensively revised in order to obtain more accurate and precise values of K. Especially, some problems involved in determining the chemical yields were examined in detail. The proposed procedure was applied to some standard rock and meteorite samples, and the analytical results are confirmed to be mostly consistent with the literature data.