Synthesis and efficiency of a spherical macroporous epoxy-imidazole complexing resin for preconcentrating trace noble metal ions

A new spherical macroporous epoxy–imidazole complexing resin was synthesized simply and rapidly from epoxy resin and used for the preconcentration and separation of trace noble metal ions from solution samples. The acidity, rate, reuse, capacity and interference on the adsorption of ions on the resin as well as the conditions of desorption of these ions from the resin and mechanism of enrichment for the ions were discussed. The results show that the relative standard deviations for the determination of 20 ng ml−1 Au(III), Ru(III) and Pd(IV) by inductively-coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry were in the range 0.5–5.0%. The procedure is applied to metal smelter samples.