Preconcentration and Determinations of Nickel, Silver Ions in Waters and Atomic Absorption Spectrometry

Nowadays heavy metals are among the most important pollutants in source and treated water and are becoming a severe public health problem. These metal ions can be harmful to aquatic life, and water contaminated by toxic metal ions remains a serious public health problem for human health.In the present work, a column separation?preconcentration method has been established for the flame atomic absorption spectrometric determination of trace amounts of silver, and nickel ions with onto resin.There were two parts in this study: First part of study; the adsorption of silver and nickel ions from aqueous solution by ion exchanger Purolite-S940 resin was studied in a column adsorption system. Several parameters, pH, amount of metal and resin, flow rates of sample, type of eluent, volume of eluent, were evaluated. The preconcentration factor and effects of foreign ions on the preconcentration were also investigated.Second part of study; The preconcentration/separation procedure is based on chelate formation of nickel and silver with hexametilenditithiocarbamate and on retention of the chelates on ion exchanger Purolite-S940 resin. Several parameters, such as pH, amount of resin, amount of ligand and metal, type of eluent, volume of sample and eluent, flow rates of sample, were evaluated. The effects of foreign ions on the preconcentration were also investigated.The Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption models were applied to describe the isotherms and isotherm constants.The proposed method was applied for the separation and preconcentration of the investigated ions in the drinking water and radiological samples.