Development of a drift-correction procedure for a photoelectric spectrometer

A technique has been developed to automatically correct for drifts in the radiometric sensitivity of the detector channels in a direct-reading emission spectrometer. The method utilizes a 1000 W tungsten-halogen reference lamp to illuminate the detectors through the same optical path as that traversed during the analysis of the sample. Detector channel responses to the light are compared to those for the same light intensity at the time of analytical calibration. This corrects for the drift. It is noted that with the exception of positioning the lamp, the procedure is fully automatic.