A simple method for the ampicillin determination in pharmaceuticals and human urine

The new kinetically-based spectrophotometric method for the determination of microquantities of ampicillin is proposed in the present paper. Ampicillin degradation in strong alkaline medium was applied for the method development. The reaction rate was monitored at 265 nm. A differential variation of the tangent method was used to process the kinetic data. The method is valid over the 3.49-55.84 µg/mL ampicillin concentration interval with relative standard deviation (RSD) range 7.79-3.20%. The calculated detection limit was determined at 2.58 µg/mL based on the 3.3S0 criterion. The interference effects of some metal ions, anions, amino acids and other molecules were investigated in order to assess the method selectivity. The method was successfully applied to determining the content of ampicillin in commercial pharmaceutical preparations and human urine. The obtained results were in good correlation with the HPLC method results. The newly developed method is simple, inexpensive and efficient for the analysis of a large number of samples at room temperature in a short time.