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7 results for “XRF analysis” in Industry
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…is within a fraction of a percent of gold's, defeating simple weight-and-volume checks. · XRF is fast, non-destructive and reads only the outer tens of microns — it validates surface composition, never the interior. · Ultrasonic velocity testing is the standard front-line defence…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
…the contained gold; specialist refiners buying in volume pay far closer to it. · Handheld XRF reads the surface only, which is why plated and filled items are caught by density checks, file tests or a destructive assay. · Recycled gold is chemically identical to mined gold after…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…st as carefully as mine-of-origin certificates for newly mined doré. · How do fire assay, XRF and ICP spectrometry differ in practice? XRF gives a fast, non-destructive surface reading used mainly for in-process monitoring; ICP spectrometry dissolves a sample to quantify trace im…
Tomas Herrera · 19 min read
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
…usands of independent engineering decisions converging on the same conclusion. · Teardown analysis — independent labs strip representative devices and assay component-level gold content, the primary data source for the sector. Refiner intake data — specialist e-waste refiners rep…
Tomas Herrera · 18 min read
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
…apid non-destructive screening, inductively coupled plasma spectrometry for trace-element analysis — but fire assay remains the method trusted to settle disputes, because its underlying chemistry has not fundamentally changed since it was refined by medieval and early-modern assa…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
After the Cyanide
Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is wh…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
