Simultaneous Spectrophotometric Determination of Iron and Cobalt in Micellar Medium by Using a Principal Component Artificial Neural Network and Multivariate Calibration

A simple and reliable method for simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of iron(II) and cobalt(II) has been established. The method is based on complex formation with 1‐(2‐pyridylazo)‐2‐naphtol (PAN) in a micellar medium. Despite a spectral overlap, Fe²⁺ and Co²⁺ have been simultaneously determined with chemometric approaches involving principal component artificial neural network (PC‐ANN), principal component regression (PCR) and partial least squares (PLS). Various synthetic mixtures of iron and cobalt were assessed and the results obtained by the applications of these chemometric approaches were evaluated and compared. It was found that the PC‐ANN method afforded relatively better precision than that of PCR or PLS. The proposed method permits detection limits of 0.05 and 0.07 ng mL^?1 for Co and Fe, respectively. The influences of pH, ligand amount, solvent percentage and time on the absorbance were also investigated. The proposed method was also applied satisfactorily for the determination of Fe(II) and Co(II) in real and synthetic samples.