Design and application of a new phase separator for flow injection liquid-liquid extraction

A new versatile phase separator for flow injection solvent extraction has been designed and its analytical performance investigated. Manifolds for various instrumentation and the corresponding operating procedures have been established. Experimental results show that the newly designed phase separator possesses several advantages over the existing ones, such as long term stability, robustness, sufficient phase separation and integral in situ collection of the solvent extracts at different phase flow rate ratios. The detection limits for cobalt, gold, iodide, iron, lead, nickel, nitrate and tungsten were 1.4, 0.45, 70, 1.9, 160, 0.9, 137 and 23 ng ml(-1), and the relative standard deviations 2.5, 1.3, 2.2, 2.9, 4.8, 3.6, 1.4 and 3.3%, respectively.