[Recent advances of chelation ion chromatography]

Chelation ion chromatography (CIC) has the outstanding advantages over the conventional ion chromatography for the analysis of metal ions in complex matrices. In recent years, most research work mainly concentrated on two active areas: 1) to simplify the flow diagram of the CIC system and make it easy to be operated; 2) to develop new high-performance chelation ion chromatographic (HPCIC) methods and new high-performance chelation phases. So, this review presents the principle of CIC method and the advances of the flow diagrams of CIC in the recent decade. The range of applications of high-performance chelation phases used for the separation and determination of metal ions by HPCIC as well as their types and properties are also considered. The high-performance chelation phases include covalently bonded, pre-coated and dynamically coated phases etc. Fifty-three references are cited.