Application of some chemometric methods in conventional and derivative spectrophotometric analysis of acetaminophen and ascorbic acid

The multivariate methods, principal component regression (PCR) and partial least squares (PLS) were tested as a calibration procedure for simultaneous ultraviolet spectrophotometric determination of acetaminophen (AC) and ascorbic acid (AA). Determination of these compounds is important because of their pharmacotherapeutic advantages. Due to spectral overlapping of AC and AA, PCR and PLS were used for construction of the calibration sets. The concentration linear range of AC and AA were 1.5–24.2 and 1.8–21.1 µg mL^?1 respectively. The absorption spectra were recorded from 215–310 nm. The minimum root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) was 1.3507 and 0.4088 for AC and AA, by PLS, 0.7525 and 0.4015 by PCR in original data and 0.9454 and 0.2875, by PLS and 1.0386 and 0.4000 by PCR in derivative data. The procedure allows the simultaneous determination of AC and AA in synthetic mixtures and real sample solutions made up from pharmaceutical products, human serum and urine. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.