Methodological approach to the study of the formation and physicochemical properties of phosphate-metal-humic complexes in solution.

The aim of this work is to study the suitability of the complementary use of ultrafiltration (UF) and the interaction with an anion-exchange resin (AR) to characterize of phosphate-metal-humic complexes in solution. The results indicate that a methodological approach consisting of the validation and calibration of the AR method by the UF method and the further use of the AR method is suitable for characterizing phosphate-metal complexes. Such an approach has proven to be useful for calculating the phosphate maximum binding capacity of iron-humic complexes and stability constants. It might also be used to obtain valuable purified phosphate-metal-humic complexes for further structural characterization.