Simultaneous determination of lanthanum and cerium in mixed rare earths with p-acetylarsenazo by spectrophotometry

A new method has been developed for the simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of small amounts of lanthanum and cerium in the presence of large amounts of rare earth elements. Lanthanum (III) and cerium (III) were determined spectrophotometrically with p-acetylarsenazo as the color reagent in the chloroacetic acid medium at pH 3.1 by measuring the absorbances of the complexes at 670 nm. The remained rare earths were masked with ethylenediaminetetracetic acid and ethylenediaminetetracetic acid-zinc during the analysis. The optimum conditions for the simultaneous determination of lanthanum and cerium have been defined. The individual content of lanthanum (III) and cerium (III) were determined by varying the amounts of EDTA and EDTA-Zn used in the analysis and solving the simultaneous absorbance equations based on the Beer's law. The proposed method has been successfully applied to the determination of lanthanum and cerium in Longnan mixed rare earth oxides and other heavy rare earths without preliminary separation with satisfactory results. The relative errors of all analytical results of the method were not more than 2% with good precision. The procedure does not require separation of lanthanum, cerium and the other rare earth elements.