Cooperative Study of Methods for the Determination of Oxygen in Steel

THE methods employed for the determination of oxides and oxygen in ferrous materials may be roughly classed in two groups, "wet" methods and "hot" methods, the first group including the iodine, electrolytic, mercuric chloride, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, and chlorine methods; the second group including the vacuum-fusion and hydrogen-reduction methods. The wet methods depend upon preferential solubility in a selected medium to separate the metallic portion of the sample from the oxygen-containing constituents. Subsequent analysis of the insoluble residue permits the isolation and separate determination of individual oxides and compounds. The hot methods depend upon the reduction of the oxide constituents of the sample by means of carbon or hydrogen at elevated temperatures. With the exception of the recently developed fractional vacuum-fusion method, the hot methods do not identify individual oxides and compounds but yield only a single value represent-ing the sum of the oxygen contents of several or all of the oxide con-stituents present. With such diversity in the principles and. aims of the different groups, it is not surprising that concordance of results by differ-ent methods has usually been difficult to obtain. The present cooperative attempt to define more rigorously than has been possible heretofore the accuracy and limits of usefulness of the vari-ous methods, originated in correspondence between Dr. John Johnston, Director of Research of the United States Steel Corporation, and other interested metallurgists. The plan was, briefly, to submit identical samples to a number of laboratories for analysis by different methods and to collate the results of these analyses. The project was endorsed by the Iron and Steel Division of the American Institute of Mining and Metal-lurgical Engineers at the annual meeting in February, 1933, and has been conducted under the joint sponsorship of the Iron and Steel Division and the National Bureau of Standards. The latter organization undertook