Abstract

Aqua regia extractions with subsequent inductively coupled plasma determinations are a very common method of elemental analysis of soils and sediments. Before extraction, the material must be dried and sieved. Small variations in this early step can have a significant impact on the later outcomes, especially for unassisted (for example, without ultrasonic or microwave) extraction procedures. Therefore the impact of mesh size on the sieving process was investigated. A mesh size of 2.0 mm or greater yielded unacceptably high variations between the subsamples and a very poor recovery rate when compared to a 0.063-mm sieve. A mesh size of 0.3 mm resulted in the best outcomes, losing nearly no material in the fine sediment samples and about a tenth in the coarse samples. The precision was high for the 0.3-mm samples as well, only negligibly surpassed by the 0.1-mm samples for some materials.