The salt accumulation process in some reservoirs of regular and irregular use (from 10 to 50 years of constrution), located in the Southeast of Bahia State was evaluated. Inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry was used to evaluate the concentrations of Na, K, Ca and Mg in water samples from inside and upstream of the reservoirs. The results showed that for reservoirs of irregular use, the salt accumulation, indicated by the tracer Na, increases with the age of the reservoirs, however for the reservoirs of regular use the hydraulic retention time is the main parameter.

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) encompasses a number of characteristics quite suitable for the simultaneous analysis of small ions such as high efficiency and resolving power, directly associated to its impressively high peak capacity, and short analysis time. In appropriate conditions, it is possible to perform the separation of approximately 36 anions in less than 3 minutes. In this work, the mechanisms by which anion analysis is performed was criteriously discussed, and a thorough review of the literature in the past 5 years, focusing mostly in applications of CE to anion analysis in real matrices, was presented.