Simultaneous voltammetric determination of molybdenum and copper by adsorption cathodic differential pulse stripping...

An adsorption differential pulse stripping method for the simultaneous determination of molybdenum and copper based on the formation of their complexes with cupferron (benzene, N-hydroxy-N-nitroso) is proposed. The optimum experimental conditions were obtained 0.010 mM cupferron, pH 3.0, accumulation potential of -0.15 V versus Ag/AgCl, accumulation time of 60 s, scan rate of 10 mV s(-1) and pulse height of 50 mV. Molybdenum and copper peak currents were observed at -0.16 and +0.02 V, respectively. A principal component artificial neural network (PC-ANN) was utilized for the analysis of the voltammogram data. A three layer back-propagation network was used with sigmoidal transfer function for the hidden and the output layers. The linear dynamic ranges were 5.0-60.0 and 0.1-20.0 ng ml(-1) for Cu(II) and Mo(VI), respectively. The detection limit was 0.06 ng ml(-1) for Mo(VI) and 0.20 ng ml(-1) for Cu(II). The capability of the method for the analysis of real samples was evaluated by the determination of molybdenum and copper in river water, tap water, and alloy.