Crown ethers and calixarenes - the latter ones discovered only recently - are powerful complexing ligands for alkali and alkaline earth metals. This led to their immediate and wide-spread application in biosciences. This book is exclusively devoted to the very promising applications of these compounds in analytical chemistry. It focusses on solvent extraction, chromatography, spectroscopy and electroanalytical methods.

Although a large number of books are available in the fields of solvent extraction and ion exchangers (extraction by chelation or solvation), this book is the first of its kind in the field of liquid ion exchangers (extraction by ion pair formation) which is an upcoming field in solvent extraction chemistry. There are a number of monographs dealing with various aspects of solvent extraction. However, the present title deals in depth with analytical chemistry liquid ion exchangers. This monograph will be very useful to analytical chemists, environmental scientists, chemical processing and material scientists, research workers in solvent extraction as well as postgraduate students majoring in analytical chemistry.This monograph comprises of several chapters. The introduction deals with elementary ideas about liquid ion exchangers and their comparisons with the solid ion exchange resins. The chapter on solvent extraction covers the general classification of mechanisms of extraction and consideration of the extraction equilibria. There are two chapters pertaining to important characteristics and principles of extraction by both liquid anion as well as liquid cation exchangers. The rest of the chapters deal with the separation of elements with liquid ion exchangers, reverse phase partition chromatography and usage of solvent extraction in separation of metals for industrial purposes.

The third edition of this book has been thoroughly revised and enlarged to include few chapters pertaining to supercritical fluid chromatography and extraction, electrophoresis, capillary electrophoresis & capillary electro-chromatography, X-Ray spectroscopy, Mossbauer spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, electron microscopy, chemiluminescence, atomic fluorescence, ionization spectroscopy, chemical sensors & biological sensors, refractometry & interferometry. In addition, all other chapters have been revised to incorporate new concepts.