[Simultaneous determination of calcium and magnesium by calculative spectrophotometric complexometric titration]

A new spectrophotometric complexometric titration method coupled with chemometrics for the determination of mixtures of metal ions has been developed. In the method described here, the titrant is a mixture of EDTA and two indicators. In the process of titration, both the volumetric addition of titrant and the progress of titration reaction can be characterized simultaneously by chemometric calculation with the absorption spectra, and then the titration curves can be obtained. With the titration curves, a matrix equation can be established, and thus the concentration of each component in the mixture of metal ions can be calculated with principal component regression. The method only needs the information of absorption spectra to obtain the analytical results, and is free of volumetric measurements. So the method is simple, convenient and precise, and has been applied to the simultaneous determination of mixtures of calcium and magnesium using malachite green and Cu-PAN as indicators with satisfactory results.