| Summary: | Potassium is an extremely important major to
element to the human body. Potassium in made up of three
isotopes with abundances of 39K at 93.1%, 40K at 0.0118%
and 41K at 6.88%. It is also very well known that 40K is to
measure the single 1460.8 keV photon from beta-decay.
However, this procedure requires a significant amount of sample and typical counting periods of at least a day in well-shielded germanium counting system. Another approach is
to determination total potassium via neutron activation
analysis using the well know 41K (n,c) 42K(T1/2 = 12.8 h)reaction and then evaluate 40K using the usual activity
equationA = kN. In our laboratory we have effectively used
thermal and epithermal neutron flux for neutron activation
analysis to determine potassium in fruits. Upward to 7–9 batches of samples, which each of batch is including 14
samples so can be analysed in 1 day using only gram quan-tities of material. In such way on can increase the output of determining 40K by at least on order of magnitude. Result of a detailed investigation optimization of the methodology,
quality control and detection limits will be presented for
reference material and various fruits samples.
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