hello,
i have a series of barium acetate solutions with excess acetic acid to achieve pH < 6 (to avoid precipitation of BaCO3). The solution concentrations range up to about 2.3 molal in barium. I'd like to find a contract lab who can give me both the barium and acetate concentrations with errors on the concentrations at the 0.002 molal level. The solutions were constructed using Baker-Malinkrodt reagent chemicals and deionized water so i'm ignoring trace level contaminants.

I'm assuming that ion-chromatography is the appropriate route for the acetate analysis but if there is a more accurate technique i'd like to know. I'm wide open to suggestions on analytical techniques for the barium (i'm trying to avoid doing gravimetric precipitation analyses for the barium because that is extremely tedious).

I'm not an analytical chemist and I'm very ignorant of analytical chemistry methodologies. I want to minimize the errors in my concentration estimates so I'd like to avoid techniques that involve order of magnitude dilutions but that might just be an aspect of my ignorance.

thanks for any help,
Charlie