Speciation of vanadium in water with quinine modified resin micro-column separation/preconcentration and their determination by fluorination assisted electrothermal vaporization (FETV)-inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES)

A simple and selective method of flow injection (FI) using a micro-column packed with quinine modified resin as solid phase extractant has been developed for preconcentration and separation of trace amount of vanadium(V) and vanadium(IV) in water samples, followed by determination with fluorination assisted electrothermal vaporization (FETV)-inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). At pH 3 ∼ 3.8, the modified resin is selective towards V(V) and almost not towards V(IV), while, V(IV) could be quantitatively adsorbed by the modified resin at pH 5 ∼ 7. The two vanadium species adsorbed by modified resin could be readily desorbed quantitatively with 0.3 ml of 0.5 mol l−1 HCl. Both vanadium species in elution were then determined by ETV-ICP-OES with the use of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) as chemical modifier. Effects of acidity, sample flow rate, concentration of elution solution and interfering ions on the recovery of the analytes have been systematically investigated. Under the optimal conditions, the adsorption capacities of the quinine modified resin for V(V) and V(IV) are 7.6 and 8.0 mg g−1, respectively. The detection limit (3σ) of V is 0.072 ng ml−1 for FETV-ICP-OES and 0.56 pg ml−1 for FETV-ICP-MS with enrichment factor of 62.5, and the relative standard deviation (R.S.D.) is 4.9% (n = 9, C = 0.2 μg ml−1) and 3.8% (n = 9, C = 1.0 ng ml−1), respectively. The proposed method has been applied to the determination of trace V(V) and V(IV) in different water samples, and the recoveries of V(V) and V(IV) are 100 ± 10%. In order to further verify the accuracy of the developed method, FETV-ICP-MS was employed to analyze the vanadium species in water samples after separation/preconcentration, and analytical results are in good agreement with that obtained by the proposed method. The developed method was also applied to the analysis of the total V in GBW07401 soil certified reference material and in GBW07605 tea leaves certified reference material, and the determined values coincided with the certified values very well.