Chemometrics assisted spectrophotometric determination of pyridine in water and wastewater Original Research Article

The paper reports a direct method for the determination of pyridine in water and wastewater samples based on ultraviolet spectrophotometric measurements using multi-way modeling techniques. Parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) and multi-way partial least squares (N-PLS) regression methods were employed for the decomposition of spectra and quantification of pyridine. The study was carried out in the pH range of 1.0–12.0 and concentration range of 0.67–51.7 μg mL−1 of pyridine. Both the three-way PARAFAC and tri-PLS1 models successfully predicted the concentration of pyridine in synthetic (spiked) river water and field wastewater samples. The mean recovery obtained from PARAFAC regression model were 97.39% for the spiked and 99.84% for the field wastewater samples, respectively. The sensitivity and precision of the method for pyridine determination were 0.58% and 5.95%, respectively. The N-PLS regression model yielded mean recoveries of 99.29% and 100.18% for the spiked and field wastewater samples, respectively. The prediction accuracy of the methods was evaluated through the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP). For PARAFAC, it was 0.65 and 0.82 μg mL−1 for spiked river water and field wastewater samples, respectively, while for N-PLS, it was 0.25 and 0.37 μg mL−1, respectively. Both the PARAFAC and N-PLS methods, thus, yielded satisfactory results for the prediction of pyridine concentration in water and wastewater samples.