Recent significant developments in detection and method development for the determination of inorganic ions by CE

CE has been available as a tool for almost 20 years, but it is only in the past several years that it has been implemented widely. This has been the result of some significant advances in the technique. These fall in the areas of indirect photometric detection (through the use of dyes as probes and LEDs as light sources), the introduction and establishment of capacitively-coupled contactless conductivity detection (C4D) as a routine, sensitive and commercially available detection method, and in software capable of simulation of separations and the selection of optimal composition of the BGE. These developments are reviewed and their impact illustrated by reference to a case study involving the rapid separation and sensitive detection of 15 anions and 12 cations on a portable CE instrument. It is shown that C4D provides considerably superior detection sensitivity (by a factor of about 8 in comparison with optimised indirect photometry).