Precious Metals Testing

The S1 TITAN and CTX are portable jewelry testers that provide accurate and repeatable karat hallmarking for gold jewelry. The karat is a measure of the purity of gold, with 24 karats being pure gold. Spelled carat in UK English, this fractional measure of gold is extremely important and has been adopted as an official measure in US law. For example, 18 karat gold is 18 parts gold and 6 parts another metal (18+6 = 24). Bruker's elemental analyzers convert the elemental percentages of gold into a karat measurement. 

Bruker gold jewelry testers provide gold concentration data and full alloy chemistry in as little as 2-5 seconds per sample, and testing is realized without any damage or alteration to the sample. Completely nondestructive analysis paired with accuracy within a few tenths of a percent of fire assay make testing gold jewelry easy for many businesses in the gold and industries. Some advantages of portable XRF for gold analysis are: 

• with Rapid measurement times ranging from 2 to 15 seconds

• On-screen results with output available in percent (%), karat (Kt) or PPM

• Complete alloy composition from simultaneous multi-element analysis

• Light-weight and easy-to-use instrument that does not require a highly-skilled operator

• Fully downloadable results for record-keeping, report-generating, and trend analysis

The S1 TITAN and CTX provide portable and robust platforms for the analysis of silver. Pure silver (Ag), known as Fine Silver or 999.5 fineness, is much too soft to use in jewelry. However, it can be used in many other applications such as electrical components, bearings for jet engines, the formation of chemicals like formaldehyde and ethylene oxide and much more.  Typically, for jewelry, silver is alloyed with another metal such as copper (Cu) to provide strength.  Sterling Silver (Ag), the world standard for silver jewelry, contains 92.5% silver and usually 7.5% copper. Example applications for portable XRF include:  

• Silver jewelry manufacturers can verify the purity of the silver they purchase to make jewelry as well as monitor their own process in alloying pure silver. 

• Jewelry dealers can determine silver purity on the spot before they purchase coins, jewelry or “pure” silver 

• Recyclers can identify silver content in electrical components, batteries and catalysts 

• Museums can authenticate and provenance photographs based on silver content (as well as other elements) of the paper 

• Silver content in artifacts can help determine provenance