Simultaneous determination of vitamins C, B6 and PP in pharmaceutics using differential pulse voltammetry with a glassy carbon electrode and multivariate calibration tools

In this work, the artificial neural networks (ANN) and partial least squares (PLS) were applied to data obtained by differential pulse voltammetry for the determination of vitamins in synthetic and pharmaceutical samples. For calibration purposes, both synthetic and commercial samples were employed as standards. From the results it was possible to verify that ANN is the best method for modeling the data due to the fact that interactions among electro-active components result in non-linear response on the glassy carbon electrode. The results achieved for the determination of vitamins in pharmaceutical samples using ANN method provided a maximum value for relative error of 0.40% for VC, 8.3% for VPP and 9.1% for VB6. The proposed methodology is simple, rapid and can be easily used to control quality laboratories as an alternative analysis method. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.