Simultaneous determination of paracetamol, caffeine and propyphenazone in ternary mixtures by micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography

A new micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatographic method has been developed to analyze the pharmaceutical preparations containing ternary combination of paracetamol (PAR), caffeine (CAF) and propyphenazone (PRO). Best results were obtained by using 20 mM pH 9.0 borate buffer containing 30 mM sodiumdodecylsulphate as the background electrolyte. Diflunisal (DİF) was used as internal standard (IS). The separation was performed through a fused silica capillary (50 μm internal diameter, 44 cm total length, 35.5 cm effective length) at 25 °C with the application of 3 s of hydrodynamic injection at 50 mbar pressure and a potential of 29 kV. Detection wavelength was 200 nm. Under these conditions, the migration times were found to be 5.174 min for PAR, 5.513 min for CAF, 7.195 min for DİF, and 9.366 min for PRO. Linearity ranges for the method were determined as 2–200 μg mL−1 for PAR and CAF and 3–200 μg mL−1 for PRO. Limit of detections were found as 0.6 μg mL−1 for PAR and CAF and 0.8 μg mL−1 for PRO. According to the validation study, the developed method was proved to be accurate, precise, sensitive, specific, rugged and robust. Three pharmaceutical preparations, which are produced by different drug companies in Turkey, were analyzed by the developed method. One of the same preparations was also analyzed by the derivative ratio spectro zero-crossing spectrophotometric method reported in literature. No significant differences were found statistically.