Towards flow-through/flow injection electronic tongue for the analysis of pharmaceuticals

The learning process (calibration) of electronic tongue (ET) systems involves the acquisition of a large number of data. The introduction of continuous-flow methods, including flow-through and flow injection analysis, can significantly streamline and simplify the calibration process. However, the performance characteristics of the sensors based on the same receptor layers differ in various modes of measurements. In this work, the performances of the potentiometric sensors working in various sensor array configurations i.e. classical, batch set-up, flow-through set-up and flow injection analysis (FIA) set-up were determined. Moreover, the classification capabilities of the designed ET systems were compared on the basis of the differentiation between pharmaceutical samples of pure Ibuprofen and Ibuprofen modified with various co-spray dried excipients. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.