Simultaneous determination of rare earth elements in ore and anti-corrosion coating samples using a portable capillary electrophoresis instrument with contactless conductivity detection.

The employment of an in-house-made capillary electrophoresis (CE) instrument with capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (C(4)D) as a simple and inexpensive solution for simultaneous determination of many rare earth elements (REEs) in ore samples from Vietnam, as well as in anti-corrosion coating samples is reported. 14 REEs (La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er, Tm, Yb and Lu) were determined using an electrolyte composed of 20mM arginine and 10mM α-hydroxyisobutyric acid adjusted to pH 4.2 with acetic acid. The best detection limit achieved was 0.24mg/L using the developed CE-C(4)D method. Good agreement between results from CE-C(4)D and the confirmation method (ICP-MS) was achieved, with a coefficient of determination (r(2)) for the two pairs of data of 0.998.