Simultaneous Quantification of Heavy Metals Using a Solid State Potentiometric Sensor Array

A potentiometric sensor array of four nonspecific electrodes with solid‐state membranes is developed and tested for simultaneous analysis of copper(II), mercury(II), and silver(I) ions. The cross‐sensitivity responses of the sensors for these ions are evaluated. The array potentiometric signals are processed by partial least‐squares regression (PLS) and back propagation artificial neural networks (ANN) to determinate analyte concentrations. The ANN configuration is optimized and two different training algorithms of the ANN are also evaluated. Best results are obtained when the potentiometric sensors are activated and the data are processed using ANN and the gradient descent adaptive algorithm. The system is used to quantify these heavy metals in synthetic samples and in dental amalgams with successful results.