Determination of trace amounts of rare earth elements in highly pure praseodymium oxide by double focusing inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and high-performance liquid chromatography

Determination of rare earth impurities in high purity samarium oxide using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry after extraction chromatographic separation

“…Checking the instrumental performance using a mixture 10 g L −1 solution contained In, Mg, Pb, Ce and Ba (also obtained from PerkinElmer, Inc). Confirming that the sensitivity was more than about 4.0 × 10 5 counts per second (cps) for 115 In, 3.0 × 10 5 cps for 24 Mg and 4.0 × 10 5 cps for 208 Pb, respectively, together with the percentage ratios of 140 Ce 16 O + / 140 Ce + and 137 Ba 2+ / 137 Ba + were less than 1.0% as well as the background was less than 5 cps at mass number 220. Table 1 also lists the conditions of ELAN 6000 ICP-MS.…”

“…Matrix suppression effect is an inherent problem during rare earth materials being analyzed using ICP-MS [1,2,19,20,22,[24][25][26][28][29][30][31]. In this work, six solutions of 99.999% high purity Sm 2 O 3 matrix with 0, 300, 500, 700, 1000 and 1500 g mL −1 spiked with Y, La, Pr, Tb of 2.0 g L −1 , respectively, were used to carried out this tests as well as 10 g L −1 In was also spiked in these solutions as internal standard.…”

“…applications of ICP-MS for the determination of trace or ultratrace REEs as impurities exist in other high purity rare earth samples or other materials in spite of some potential problems encountered in the analytical procedures, such as matrix suppression and isobaric interferences of atomic and molecular ions [2][3][4][11][12][13]16,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. The matrix suppression could be compensated by means of adding internal standard because the intensity of internal standard element and analytes of interest decreased at the same time with matrix concentration increasing [2,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

“…The matrix suppression could be compensated by means of adding internal standard because the intensity of internal standard element and analytes of interest decreased at the same time with matrix concentration increasing [2,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. However, the problem of mass spectra interferences could critically restrict ICP-MS analytical capabilities of the analysis of many high purity rare earth materials [19][20].…”

“…Day et al successfully developed an analytical procedure using capillary electrophoresis coupled on-line to a double-focusing sector field ICP-MS (CE-ICP-MS) for the analysis of mixtures of REEs in aqueous samples [16]. Otherwise, ICP-MS coupled on-line to liquid chromatographic (LC-ICP-MS) were also used in the analytical procedures in high purity rare earth samples [24][25][26][27]. On the other hand, some chemical separation procedures, such as liquid-liquid extraction [12], solvent extraction [13,30] and chromatographic extraction [28,29] were also used prior to ICP-MS detection for the analysis of high purity rare earth materials and other materials.…”