Simultaneous kinetic determination of sulfite and sulfide using artificial neural networks

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are proposed for the determination of sulfite and sulfide simultaneously. The method is based on the reaction between Brilliant Green (BG) as a colored reagent and sulfite and/or sulfide in buffered solution (pH 7.0) and monitoring the changes of absorbance at maximum wavelength of 628 nm. Experimental conditions such as pH, reagents concentrations, and temperature were optimized and training the network was performed using principal components (PCs) of the original data. The network architecture (number of input, hidden and output nodes), and some parameters such as learning rate (η) and momentum (α) were also optimized for getting satisfactory results with minimum errors. The measuring range was 0.05-3.6 μg ml⁻¹ for both analytes. The proposed method has been successfully applied to the quantification of the sulfite and sulfide in different water samples.