Determination of tartrazine in beverage samples by stopped-flow analysis and three-way multivariate calibration of non-linear kinetic-spectrophotometric data

The performance of MCR-ALS was studied in the modeling of non-linear kinetic-spectrophotometric data acquired by a stopped-flow system for the quantitation of tartrazine in the presence of brilliant blue and sunset yellow FCF as possible interferents. In the present work, MCR-ALS and U-PCA/RBL were firstly applied to remove the contribution of unexpected components not included in the calibration set. Secondly, a polynomial function was used to model the non-linear data obtained by the implementation of the algorithms. MCR-ALS was the only strategy that allowed the determination of tartrazine in test samples accurately. Therefore, it was applied for the analysis of tartrazine in beverage samples with minimum sample preparation and short analysis time. The proposed method was validated by comparison with a chromatographic procedure published in the literature. Mean recovery values between 98% and 100% and relative errors of prediction values between 4% and 9% were indicative of the good performance of the method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.