Spectrophotometric determination of organic dye mixtures by using multivariate calibration

The simultaneous determination of organic dye mixtures by using spectrophotometric methods is a difficult problem in analytical chemistry, due to spectral interferences. By using multivariate calibration methods such as partial least-squares regression (PLSR), it is possible to obtain a model adjusted to the concentration values of the mixtures used in the calibration stage. In this study, the calibration model is based on absorption spectra in the 350-650-nm range for a set of 16 different mixtures of reactive red 195, reactive yellow 145 and reactive orange 122 dyes, and made the determination of the dye concentrations possible in a validation set with significantly greater accuracy than the conventional univariate calibration method. By using the developed model it was possible to monitor the decolorization kinetic of one dye (reactive orange 122), when the mixture of the three dyes was previously submitted to an ozonation process.