Simultaneous determination of some components in detergent washing powder by mid-infrared spectrometry and artificial neural network

A method has been established for simultaneous determination of sodium sulfate, sodium carbonate, and sodium tripolyphosphate in detergent washing powder samples based on attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform IR spectrometry in the mid-IR spectral region (800-1550 cm(-1)). Genetic algorithm (GA) wavelength selection followed by feed forward back-propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) was the chemometric approach. Root mean square error of prediction for BP-ANN and GA-BP-ANN was 0.0051 and 0.0048, respectively. The proposed method is simple, with no tedious pretreatment step, for simultaneous determination of the above-mentioned components in commercial washing powder samples.