Resolution by polarographic techniques of atrazine–simazine and terbutryn–prometryn binary mixtures by using PLS calibration and artificial neural networks

Abstract

The simultaneous polarographic determination of atrazine–simazine and terbutryn–prometryn binary mixtures is reported. The polarographic signals of these compounds show high overlap, and for this reason different multicomponent approaches such as partial least squares (PLS) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) were utilized to determine each compound in their respective mixtures. Calibration models were made from solutions containing river water and known concentration of the pesticides. The results obtained for synthetic samples and river water samples spiked with known amount of these pesticides were satisfactory. For terbutryn–prometryn mixtures the lowest standard deviations and the best results in the prediction were achieved with ANN.