Simultaneous polarographic chemometric determination of lead, copper, vanadium, cadmium and nickel

Chemometric approaches, such as classical least squares (CLS), principal co mponent regression (PCR), partial least squares (PLS) and iterative target transformation factor analysis (ITTFA), were applied to the simultaneous de termination of mixtures of lead, copper, vanadium, cadmium and nickel by di fferential pulse polarography (DPP). The conventional and first-derivative polarograms of the mixtures were used to perform the optimization of the ca libration procedure by chemometric models. The proposed method was applied satisfactorily to the determination of a set of synthetic mixtures of metal in Britton-Robinson buffer (pH 2.87) and potassium thiocyanate and accepta ble results were obtained. The results obtained by the application of the d ifferent chemometric approaches are discussed and compared. It was found th at factor analysis methods generally give better results than CLS and no si gnificant advantages were found with the application of derivative techniqu e, except for ITTFA in this polarographic work. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B .V. All rights reserved.