Simultaneous voltammetric determination of four triazine herbicides in water samples with the aid of chemometrics

Abstract

A novel differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) method was developed for the simultaneous analysis of herbicides in water. A mixture of four herbicides, atrazine, simazine, propazine and terbuthylazine was analyzed simultaneously and the complex, overlapping DPV voltammograms were resolved by several chemometrics methods such as partial least squares (PLS), principal component regression (PCR) and principal component–artificial networks (PC–ANN). The complex profiles of the voltammograms collected from a synthetic set of samples were best resolved with the use of the PC–ANN method, and the best predictions of the concentrations of the analytes were obtained with the PC-ANN model (%RPE_T = 6.1 and average %Recovery = 99.0). The new method was also used for analysis of real samples, and the obtained results were compared well with those from the GC-MS technique. Such conclusions suggest that the novel method is a viable alternative to the other commonly used methods such as GC, HPLC and GC-MS.

Keywords:

• Triazine herbicides
• differential pulse voltammetry
• chemometrics
• artificial neural networks

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of this study by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC-21065007), the Education Department Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province (GJJ10037 and GJJ13110), and the State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology of Nanchang University (SKLF-ZZA-201302 and SKLF-ZZB-201303).