Sequential injection analysis with second-order treatment for the determination of dyes in the exhaustion process of tanning effluents

A sequential injection (SI)-DAD spectrophotometric method to control the exhaustion of dyes in a mixture of three dyes from a tanning industry process has been developed. It is based on an interdiffusion process of the sample and reagents which leads to a gradual fall in pH through the channel to the detector recording a data matrix. The aim of this paper is to develop a second-order calibration model that is unaffected by interferents by applying multivariate curve resolution with alternating least squares (MCR-ALS). We obtained a linear calibration in the 5–30 mg l−1 range with a correlation coefficient of 0.999 for each dye with detection limits of 2.6, 3.9 and 2.1 mg l−1 for Acid Red, Acid Brown and Acid Orange, respectively. The simultaneous determination of the three dyes from tanning samples showed a satisfactory precision for the three analytes. The method has been validated comparing the concentration of some spiked samples with the expected concentration using a t-paired test. When we used this method to study the exhaustion of dyes, we found that there were several stages in this process. These data may be the key to optimising the exhaustion process.