Normal and differential demasking flow-injection manifold for the direct spectrophotometric determination of zinc(ii) in biological materials and pharmaceutical formulations

Abstract

A normal and a differential demasking flow-injection (FI) manifold were developed and optimized for the spectrophotometric determination of microamounts of Zn(II) in biological materials and pharmaceutical formulations. The reported method is very sensitive, rapid, simple and it is based upon the reaction of Zn(II) with 2,2′-dipyridyl-2-pyridylhydrazone (DPPH) in a strongly basic medium to form a yellow-coloured complex (λ_max = 448 nm). By using the differential demasking manifold, the tolerance of the method to many cations was enhanced by a mean factor of 25. The obtained calibration graphs were linear in the range of 0–10 mg l⁻¹ Zn(II), at a sampling rate of 120 injections h⁻¹ in both cases. The precisions of both manifolds were very good (RSD = 0.6 and 0.8%, respectively) and the 3σ detection limits were quite satisfactory (c_L = 4 and 6 ng ml⁻¹ respectively). The method has been successfully applied to the determination of Zn(II) in serum, human hair and pharmaceutical formulations with recoveries ranging between 98.0 and 101.6%. The obtained results were also in excellent agreement with flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS), since the mean relative error was e_r = 0.9%.