Trace anion determination in concentrated hydrofluoric acid solutions by two-dimensional ion chromatography

Since years, ion exclusion chromatography (ICE) has been the standard method to separate strong acid analyte anions from concentrated weak acid matrices such as hydrofluoric acid (HF). In this work, the commercially available IonPac ICE-AS1 column was used to separate trace levels of chloride, nitrate, sulfate and phosphate from HF solutions at 20% (w/w). The efficiency of the separation was studied in more detail using techniques such as ion chromatography (IC), inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) and ICP-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). For 20% (w/w) HF solutions and at a water carrier flow-rate of 0.50 ml/min, the cut window was set from 8.5 to 14.5 min. Under these conditions, analyte recoveries of better than 90% were obtained for chloride, nitrate and sulfate, but only about 75% for phosphate. The HF rejection efficiency was better than 99.9%. It was found that the ICP techniques, measuring total element levels and not species, yielded significantly higher recoveries for phosphorus and sulfur compared to IC. Evidence will be given that part of the added phosphorus (∼15% for an addition of 10 mg PO4/kg) is present as mono-fluorophosphoric acid (H2FPO3). In the case of sulfate, the difference between IC and ICP-MS could be attributed to an important matrix effect from the residual HF concentration.