Determination of potassium in fertilizers by emission flame photometry

Abstract

In this paper was studied the flame photometric method for potassium determination in fertilizers using only aqueous extract of fertilizer and aqueous extract content ammonium oxalate, comparatively with the volumetric sodium tetraphenyboron (STPB) method. The flame photometric method using only aqueous extract presented results always down of that STPB method being its relative error on an avarage - 0.76% with potassium fertilizer materials and approximately - 3% with mixtures. The flame photometric method using aqueous extract content ammonium oxalate presented results enough near that STPB method, being its relative error on an avarage - 0.35% with potassium fertilizer materials and approximately 0.7% with mixtures but alternated among positive and negative error. The precision of both photometric method is very high but it must have much care with dilutions, that are larges.