Simultaneous kinetic spectrophotometric analysis of five synthetic food colorants with the aid of chemometrics

This paper describes a simple and sensitive kinetic spectrophotometric method for the simultaneous determination of Amaranth, Ponceau 4R, Sunset Yellow, Tartrazine and Brilliant Blue in mixtures with the aid of chemometrics. The method involved two coupled reactions, viz. the reduction of iron(III) by the analytes to iron(II) in sodium acetate/hydrochloric acid solution (pH 1.71) and the chromogenic reaction between iron(II) and hexacyanoferrate(III) ions to yield a Prussian blue peak at 760 nm. The spectral data were recorded over the 500–1000 nm wavelength range every 2 s for 600 s. The kinetic data were collected at 760 nm and 600 s, and linear calibration models were satisfactorily constructed for each of the dyes with detection limits in the range of 0.04–0.50 mg L−1. Multivariate calibration models for kinetic data were established and verified for methods such as the Iterative target transform factor analysis (ITTFA), principal component regression (PCR), partial least squares (PLS), and principal component-radial basis function-artificial neural network (PC-RBF-ANN) with and without wavelet packet transform (WPT) pre-treatment. The PC-RBF-ANN with WPT calibration performed somewhat better than others on the basis of the %RPET (∼9) and %Recovery parameters (∼108), although the effect of the WPT pre-treatment was marginal (∼0.5% RPET). The proposed method was applied for the simultaneous determination of the five colorants in foodstuff samples, and the results were comparable with those from a reference HPLC method.