Natural deposits of rare-earth elements are abundant in China, and the rare-earth industry is important in the Chinese economy, because of their special photogenic, magnetic, mechanical and nuclear properties; rare-earth elements are widely applied in the fields of glass and ceramic industries, metallurgy, electronics, agriculture and natural science. 1 Chemists are increasingly paying attention to studies of the environmental, medical and biological applications of rare-earth elements to develop a rare-earth industry. Therefore, methods for their rapid, sensitive and accurate determination and separation are of great importance. However, it is extremely difficult to determine them individually without a preseparation due to the similarity of their chemical properties. More selective techniques, such as mass spectrometry (MS), inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and chromatography, are generally applied to individual determination of rare-earth elements. Although satisfactory results have been obtained, they have the disadvantages of relatively high costs incurred, and sometimes serious base effects. 2 Therefore, analysts have done much work to find some convenient methods for the individual quantification of these rare-earth species. Recently, spectrophotometry combined with chemometric approaches are often applied to the quantitative analysis of mixtures of rareearth elements. [3][4][5][6][7] However, many of these reported studies just involve the trace analysis of rare-earth elements, and generally a color reaction with the addition of a chromogenic reagent is necessary. For the determination of a mixture of rare-earth elements with major concentrations, a complexometric titration method can generally be used; it is only possible to determine the total amount of rare-earth elements.
8It has been found that in perchloric acid, some rare earth elements have well-shaped absorption spectra in the ultraviolet region without the addition of any chromogenic reagents, though these spectra are seriously overlapped. In these cases, chemometric approaches have the ability to resolve and quantify mixtures of rare-earth elements. Recently, Peralta-Zamora et al. 9 have reported a method to determine lanthanide mixtures by partial least squares (PLS); the molar absorptivities obtained for these lanthanides are in the range of 10.49 -26.00.In the present work, it was found that heavy rareearth elements (europium, terbium and yttrium) with high-level concentrations have good adsorption spectra in 1.0 mol l -1 perchloric acid with strongly overlapped spectra in the ultraviolet region. A Kalman filter was used to resolve the spectra of the mixture. In contrast to conventional implementation of the Kalman filter, an improved Kalman filter using the absorption-coefficient matrix obtained from a known set of mixtures by multiple linear regression (MLR) was found to yield the best results in this work. Department of Chemistry, Nanchang Univer...