Quantification of Rhodium in a Series of Inorganic and Organometallic Compounds using Cobalt as Internal Standard

An analytical method for the quantification of rhodium using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) and cobalt as internal standard was developed. Rhodium recovery was determined in different samples, which included a certified reference material (CRM), pure rhodium metal, inorganic RhCl3·3H2O salt as well as different organometallic compounds. Excellent rhodium recoveries of 100, 100, 99.0 and 99.7 % with relative standard deviations (RSD) of 1.0, 1.0, 0.3 and 0.4 % were obtained for the CRM, rhodium metal sample, RhCl3·3H2O and [Rh(cupf)(PPh3)(CO)(CH3)(I)], respectively. The accurate recovery of rhodium was, however, affected by the presence of easily ionized elements (EIE) and unmatched acid matrixes with a decrease in rhodium recovery of up to 16 %. Validation parameters such as accuracy, precision, specificity, limit of detection (LOD) and robustness were all investigated to confirm the suitability of this newly developed analytical procedure for rhodium determination