Borate (boric acid) plays a role in both animal and plant physiology and is widely used as a preservative or bacteriostatic agent by food and pharmaceutical industries
Borate entering a river or water purification plant partly precipitates as calcium borate and dissolved borates at high concentrations can show toxicity towards plants and other aquatic life so care is needed when discharging high concentrations to waste and should be monitored.
The MIC-1 Advanced Modular IC system from Metrohm - working without chemical suppression - has four components, the low pulsation 818 dual piston pump, the high performance 819 IC detector, the 820 separation centre and built in column oven with control and data acquisition through the 830 IC interface.
The special electronic suppression of the detector enables very low concentration ranges (<10ug/l) for anions and cations to be determined.
All parts that come into contact with the eluent and sample are metal free.
The MIC-1 advanced modular IC system requires no costly eluent cartridges or overhead gases - simply basic laboratory reagents costing less than 2p per 33 hours of continuous analysis and a supply of ultra-pure deionised water.
Borate exists in the following equilibrium:.
H3BO3 <=> H2BO3- <=> HBO3= <=> BO3=.
Due to nature of this equilibrium it is necessary to work without chemical suppression, otherwise the borate species would not be quantifiable.
As the analysis is performed non-suppressed (chemically), this means a reduction in the running costs of the system with no down time required for maintenance or replacement of expensive electrolytic suppressor modules.
Sample preparation is easy, simply a dilution with ultra-pure deionised water and the whole process can easily be automated with the use of a Metrohm autosampler to maximise sample throughput and further reduce running costs.
