The experimenter is confronted nearly every day with the examination of results from his or her own experiments as well as those of others. There is a need to know the methods by which the data were obtained and what confidence can be placed in the numerical results. Significant aspects of these matters involve the principles and methods of statistics, and the jective of this chapter is to describe the basic ideas of statistics that are relevant to errors of observations and numbers derived from these observations. 

Since the University of Oulu bought last year a LA-ICP-MS to expand their ways of research concerning corrosion and agglomeration problems in fluidized bed boilers. The objective of this thesis was to give a review about LA-ICP-MS, what are its capabilities, how to calibrate, what are the start up procedures and what kind of measurements can we make? The thesis will discus every step of the LA-ICP-MS; ablation, ionisation and detection applied on the LA-ICP-MS of the University of Oulu. After the literature part we try to improve our measurement strategies with the LAICP-MS, in order to get better results out of it. I would like to thank the University of Oulu for giving me the opportunity to write my thesis here. While writing my thesis I had a lot of help from Risto Laitinen, Minna Tiainen, Harri Kola, Heikki Ollila, Mirja Piispanen and Susanna Arvilommi, I would like to thank them for that. Thanks go also to Andoni Michelena and Bert De Smet for reading my thesis through. Finally I would like to thank my parents for their financial and mental support.  <...>

Amazingly, 18 years after the commercialization of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), less than 4000 systems have been installed worldwide. If you compare this number with another rapid multielement technique, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), first commercialized in 1974, the difference is quite significant. In 1992, 18 years after ICP-OES was introduced, more than 9000 units had been sold, and if you compare it with the same time period that ICP-MS has been available, the difference is even more dramatic.

Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) was developed as a commercial analytical technique in the early 1980’s and has since been applied to the determination of trace, minor and major elements in almost every analytical field. Strengths of the technique include:

• Wide elemental coverage - virtually all elements can be measured by ICP-MS, including alkali and alkaline earth elements, transition and other metals, metalloids, rare earth elements, most of the halogens and some of the non-metals

Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP‐MS) is undoubtedly the fastest‐growing trace element technique available today. Since its commercialization in 1983, approximately 5000 systems have been installed worldwide, carrying out many varied and diverse applications. The most common ones, which represent approximately 80% of the ICP‐MS analyses being carried out today, include environmental, geological, semiconductor, biomedical, and nuclear application fields.

Milestones mark great events: walking on the moon, analyzing rocks on Mars, flying a self-propelled, heavier-than-air machine, using a Bunsen burner for flame atomic spectrometry, and perhaps employing an atmospheric pressure plasma mass spectrometry as an ion source for solution mass spectrometry. Yes, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) ranks among the milestone inventions of spectrochemical analysis during the 20th century.

Учебное пособие написано в соответствии с требованиями образовательной программы ГОСВО – Государственные требования к минимуму содержания и уровню подготовки выпускников (введены в действие с 27.03.2000 г. Министерства образования Российской федерации) и предназначено для студентов геологических специальностей высших учебных заведений. 

Методические указания написаны в соответствии с требованиями образовательной программы ГОСВО – Государственные требования к минимуму содержания и уровню подготовки выпускников (введены в действие с 27.03.2000 г. Министерства образования Российской федерации) и предназначены для студентов специальности 130301 «Геологическая съемка, поиски и разведка полезных ископаемых» высших учебных заведений и могут быть рекомендованы для студентов других геологических специальностей, а также для подготовки магистров, аспирантов кафедры.