A statistical comparison of platinum plant digestion data obtained from GFAAS and ICP-OES

To date, to our knowledge there have not been reports on the comparison between Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (GFAAS) and Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES) for the determination of low levels of platinum. Although GFAAS and ICP-OES are very different instrumental techniques, the analysis of environmental platinum plant digestion samples showed that there was no significant difference between the two techniques at the 95% confidence interval. The result of the variance tests or F-test was much smaller than the tabulated F-test value. The F-test values obtained for the analysis ranged from 0.00 to 2.67 and the tabulated value was 19.16. In addition, a comparison of the means at the 95% confidence interval showed that the means obtained for each sample were not significantly different. The values obtained by the comparison ranged from 1.63 to 0.039 and the tabulated Student's t-test value was 3.182.