Palladium is one of the precious metals. In the field of analytical science, palladium is used as a matrix modifier for the determination of several metals by electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry. 1,2 Owing to its corrosion resistance nature and alloying ability, palladium is an important element in metallurgy. Its alloys are used in dental and medicinal devices and in jewelry manifacture. Moreover, palladium is used in automobile catalysts together with Pt and Rh. They oxide specific toxic components such as carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and also various nitrous oxides in hot gases as they pass through the exhaust system. 3,4 Palladium can be determined by expensive instruments such as inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometer, 3,5,6 glow discharge mass spectrometer 4 and electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometer 1,2,7 either with or without separation and preconcentration steps.Palladium is widely determined spectrophotometrically after preconcentration by extraction, adsorption or reversed phase high-performance liquid chromatography. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] Spectrophotometric determination is normally simple, but solvent extraction of palladium is difficult because of slow extraction rates. Because the complexing of palladium is difficult at room temperature, heating the solution or using a catalyst can be necessary. In addition, any excess of reagent is also extracted into the organic phase causing high reagent blanks. For such reasons, many improvement studies have been done and many complexing agents have been tested for increasing the extractibility of palladium. [9][10][11][12] Flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS) is a simple and cheap technique for the determination of trace amounts of palladium. But, because of the low abundance of palladium in many samples, the direct determination of it by FAAS is often difficult. Moreover, with the air-acetylene system, severe depression of absorbance occurs in the presence of iridium and nickel and smaller but noticeable depression in the presence of iron, chromium and platinium. 21 In order to prevent these interferences and increase sensitivity, generally separation and preconcentration of palladium from sample matrix are necessary. For this purpose, extraction, 22 ion exchange 23 or adsorption 24 techniques have been used.In this study, adsorption has been used as an enrichment technique.Because of the purity and good adsorption properties, Amberlite XAD-16 resin, which has the largest surface area of Amberlite XAD series, was used as adsorbent. The various parameters such as pH, elution solution, volume of sample, complexing agent, interfering ions and flow rate have been evaluated. The procedure developed has been succesfully employed for the trace determination of palladium in alloys.
Experimental
ApparatusA Philips PU 9285 flame atomic absorption spectrometer was used for the determination of palladium; it was equipped with a deuterium lamp background correction, a hollow cathode lamp and an air-a...