Jump to content

Analytical chemistry

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Analytical chemistry is a branch of chemistry. It tries to analyze chemicals in things. A simple job would be to see how much zinc is in a piece of brass. There are several methods, like chromatography and mass spectrometry to do this. Flame tests can be used for a basic analysis.

More formally: it is the study of the chemical components of natural and artificial materials.[1]

Qualitative analysis finds what chemical species are in the sample. Quantitative analysis finds out how much of a substance there are in a sample. Substances in a sample are often separated from each other using chromatography before the analysis. This is because a sample can contain many different substances.

References

[change | change source]
  1. Holler, F. James; Skoog, Douglas A.; West, Donald M. (1996). Fundamentals of analytical chemistry. Philadelphia: Saunders College Pub. ISBN 0-03-005938-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)[page needed]
[change | change source]