Rare Earth Elements in Human and Environmental Health: Chapter 11 Rare Earth Elements Equilibria in Aqueous Media

In a chemical environment, the speciation, the distribution of an element within all the species that it may form, is necessary to know. Once the formation constants of the complexes that in each oxidation state the element may form with all the ligands present in the tissue are available, a still more detailed picture of the system can be obtained. Pressure, temperature, pH, total concentration of all the elements and the ligands, redox potential, ionic strength, determine the speciation of each element in any thermodynamic system at equilibrium. In this chapter a description of Equilibrium Analysis methodologies for speciation studies of real-world systems is proposed.