Metal complexes stability constant determination by hyphenation of capillary electrophoresis with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry: the case of 1:1 metal-to-ligand stoichiometry.

Nuclear energy development has raised new issues like radionuclides biogeochemistry. The modelling of their biochemical properties involves the accurate determination of thermodynamical data, like stability constants. This can be achieved by using hyphenated capillary electrophoresis (CE)-ICPMS and the method was applied successfully on 1:1 lanthanum-oxalate and uranyl-oxalate complexes. Several significant steps are discussed: choice of analytical conditions, electrophoretic mobility calculation, mathematical treatment of experimental data by using linear regressions, ligand concentration and ionic strength corrections. The following values were obtained with a good precision for lanthanum-oxalate and uranyl-oxalate complexes: log(K degrees (LaOxa(+)))=6.10+/-0.10 and log(K degrees (UO(2)Oxa))=6.40+/-0.30, respectively, at infinite dilution. These values are consistent with the literature data, showing CE-ICPMS potential for metal complexes stability constants determination.