27. Spektrometertagung 2017

Metallic as well as non-metallic elements are commonly added in the production of powder metallurgy steels to improve mechanical properties of the material. For further improvement of material behavior (e.g. hardness or ductility) as well as the production process (e.g. working conditions) information about the materials composition is required. Besides knowledge of overall element contents also data about their distribution within the material is needed. In this work, the possibilities for laterally resolved analysis of powder metallurgy steels using Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) will be outlined. LA-ICP-MS offers extraordinary detection power for metallic and most non-metallic steel components, combined with the capability of elemental imaging with lateral resolutions in the µm range. This contribution presents a first approach to determine the distribution of Cr, Mn, Ni, Cu and the non-metals Si and C in PM-steels produced via liquid phase sintering. For signal quantification a multivariate regression model was developed, which allowed to overcome the matrix effects associated with local variations in sample composition.