High-capacity chitosan-based chelating resin for on-line collection of transition and rare-earth metals prior to inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry measurement.

High-capacity chitosan-based chelating resin, N-(2-hydroxyethyl)glycine-type chitosan, was synthesized using chloromethyloxirane (CMO) as a cross-linker and a coupling arms and hydroxylethylamine and bromoacetic acid as a synthesizer for the N-(2-hydroxyethyl)glycine chelating moiety. The CMO could bind with both of hydroxyl and amino group of the chitosan resin, and then couple with the chelating moiety. Increasing the amounts of chelating moiety could increase the capacity of the resin toward metal ions. Most transition and rare-earth metals could adsorb quantitatively on the resin at wide pH ranges and could be separated from alkaline and alkaline-earth metals. The resin was packed in a mini-column (40 mm length x 2 mm i.d.) which was installed in a Multi-Auto-Pret system. The Multi-Auto-Pret system coupled with ICP-AES was successfully applied to the determination of transition and rare-earth metals in river water samples.