What does flame photometry involve?
The use of emission spectroscopy in the ultraviolet and visible regions to identify and estimate the amounts of various elements which are excited in a flame, an arc or high voltage spark is known as flame photometry. The use of flame photometry as a quantitative tool can be traced to work by Kirchhoff and Bunsen in the early 1860s.1 Its modern history begins, however, in the 1940s, when instruments became available that successfully addressed the problems of reproducible sample introduction and detection. Flame photometry soon developed into a reliable analytical technique for the determination of several cations of pharmaceutical interest, notably sodium, potassium, and lithium. The technique is useful in the analysis of bulk drugs, dosage forms, and clinical samples such as blood and urine. High-temperature flame photometry has evolved into separate techniques, typically identified by their temperature sources (e.g., inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry, ICP-AES2)
