Development of a combustion system for liquid or gas samples

Abstract

While it is customary to use solid samples for measuring the 14C/12C ratio, it is sometimes necessary to handle liquid or gas samples. Motivated by a scientific purpose to count radiocarbon yields in deuterated acetone irradiated with energetic neutrons, we developed a new combustion system to treat liquid or gas samples. In contrast with the typical combustion system using CuO for solid samples, the new combustion system uses high-purity O2 (99.999%) gas. As an initial investigation, we combusted deuterated acetone (acetone-d6, certified 100.0 atm % D) to make CO2 under the ambient O2 pressure. The resulting CO2 gas then went through the reduction process to form graphite for further accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measurement.