Separation and preconcentration of some rare earth elements using eriochrome black-T modified Fe3O4 particles

Within the scope of the thesis study, it was aimed to develop a new fast, economical, environmentally friendly analytical method for the separation and preconcentration of Sm(III), Eu(III), Tb(III), Ho(III), Yb(III) and Lu(III) ions Fe3O4 (Fe3O4@EBT) magnetic particles modified with Eriochrome Black T (EBT). Inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry was used to determine the analytes. Characterization of the synthesized Fe3O4@EBT sorbent was achieved using FT-IR spectrometry and SEM imaging technique. In the developed method, the sorbent mass, sorption time and initial concentration of analyte solution parameters that effective on the sorption and elution time, eluent concentration and eluent volume parameters effective in elution were optimized using the Box-Behnken Design optimization procedure. The optimum experimental conditions for the simultaneous separation and preconcentration of metal ions were determined as follows; sorbent mass=15 mg, sorption time=50 s, analyte initial concentration=15 ppb, elution time=74.1 s, eluent concentration=1.2 mol/L and eluent volume=5.4 mL. Validation of the developed method was carried out by the analysis of a multi element standard reference material and as a result of the analysis, recovery values were obtained between 95.51-99.95%. The limits of detection and limits of quantification of the developed method were determined between 0.05-1.83 µg/L and 0.16-6.10 µg/L for target analytes. Preconcentration factors of the analytes were calculated as 46.30 for Sm(III) and Tb(III), 4.63 for Eu(III) and 1.85 for Ho(III), Yb(III) and Lu(III). The developed method was successfully applied on analyte spiked and unspiked soil and water samples.