2-Pyridylaldehydebenzoylhydrazone derivatives as highly selective precolumn chelating reagents for nickel (II) ion in kinetic differentiation mode high-performance liquid chromatography

2-Pyridylaldehydearoylhydrazones have been examined as reagents for precolumn derivatization of metal ions in the HPLC-spectrophotometry system. With the simplest analog, 2-pyridylaldehydebenzoylhydrazone (PAB), among 11 metal ions only Ni(II) ion gives the peak while the other metal chelates seem to be dissociated on an HPLC column where no added PAB is present in the eluent solutions. All other PAB analogs exhibit the peak for Ni(II) ion as well as Co(III) ion. In one reagent system, V(V) and Fe(II) chelates also appear in the chromatograms. It has been stressed that the selectivity principle is the kinetic differentiation (KD) towards metal chelates associated with the HPLC processes. The specificity for Ni(II) ion is in close relation to a key structure of the ligand molecules which provides an N,N,O coplanar coordination environment to form two five-membered chelate rings. An extremely selective and sensitive KD-HPLC method for the quantitation of Ni(II) ion at the ultra-trace levels was assessed; the detection limit (3 σ_Blank) for Ni(II) ion was down to 5.34 × 10^-9 mol l^-1 (31.5 pg in a 100 μl injection) and the excellent applicability was checked using coal fly ash samples.