Calcium Activities During Different Ion Exchange Separation Procedures

Abstract:

Calcium is a major element and participates in many geological processes. Investigations on stable calcium isotopic compositions of natural geological samples provide a great powerful tool to understand all kinds of those geological processes from a view of the field of isotope geochemistry. With the development of modern instruments and chemical separation techniques, calcium isotopic compositions could be determined even more precisely if the column chemistry brings no deviation.

Usually, Calcium is separated from matrix elements using cation resin columns and the related chemical separation techniques seem to be robust. However, more detailed work still need to be done on matrix effects and calcium isotopic fractionations on column chemistry or during elution processes. If calcium is run on TIMS instruments, the interference effect could be lower and easier controlled, thus, the requirement to the chemistry is relatively not critic, but calcium fractionation on filaments could be much difficult to monitor. If calcium is run on MC-ICP-MS instruments, the interference effect could be huge and is really difficult to be recognized and subtracted, the requirement to the chemistry is much more critical in order to get a real result of the sample, but the instrument fractionation could be easier to monitor.

Here we investigate calcium activities on several kinds of cation resins under different column/acid conditions. We seek to find a good balance between recovery and interference effect on column chemistry and are intend to set up a better chemical separation procedure to satisfy the instrument requirements for calcium. In addition, Calcium isotopic fractionation on column will also be discussed further here based on our previous and ongoing results.