Simultaneous determination of iron and aluminium by differential kinetic spectrophotometric method and chemometrics.

A differential kinetic spectrophotometric method was researched and developed for the simultaneous determination of iron and aluminium in food samples. It was based on the direct reaction kinetics and spectrophotometry of these two metal ions with Chrome Azurol S (CAS) in ethylenediamine-hydrochloric acid buffer (pH 6.3). The results were interpreted with the use of chemometrics. The kinetic runs and the visible spectra of the complex formation reaction were studied between 540 and 750 nm every 30 s over a total period of 285 s. A set of synthetic metal mixture samples was used to build calibrations models. These were based on the spectral and kinetic two-way data matrices, which were processed separately by the radial basis function-artificial neural network (global RBF-ANN) method. The prediction performance of these models was poorer than that from the combined kinetic-spectral three-way array, which was similarly processed by the same method (% relative prediction error (RPE(T))=5.6). These results demonstrate that improved predictions can be obtained from the data array, which has more information, and that appropriate chemometrics methods can enhance analytical performance of simple techniques such as spectrophotometry. Other chemometrics models were then applied: N-way partial least squares (NPLS), parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC), back propagation-artificial neural network (BP-ANN), single radial basis function-artificial neural network (RBF-ANN), and principal component neural network (PC-RBF-ANN). There was no substantial difference between the methods with the overall %RPE(T) range being 5.0-5.8. These two values corresponded to the NPLS and BP-ANN models, respectively. The proposed method was applied for the determination of iron and aluminium in some commercial food samples with satisfactory results.