Mathematical representation of electrophoretic mobility of basic drugs in ternary solvent buffers in capillary zone electrophoresis

The electrophoretic mobilities of two β-blocker drugs, i.e., labetalol and atenolol, have been determined in a mixed solvent background electrolyte system containing sodium acetate+acetic acid as buffering agent and different volume fractions of water, methanol and ethanol using capillary electrophoresis. The produced data and three other sets collected from a recent work are employed to study the accuracy and prediction capability of a mathematical model to calculate the electrophoretic mobility with respect to the volume fractions of the solvents in the mixture. The results show that the proposed model is able to correlate/predict the mobility within an acceptable error range and it is possible to use the model in industry to achieve the optimum solvent composition for the buffer where using a ternary solvent system is required. The average percentage deviations (APDs) obtained for correlated and predicted data points are 0.71–2.48 and 1.72–4.39%, respectively. The accuracy of the proposed model is compared with that of a mixture response surface method and the results show that the proposed model is superior from both correlation and prediction points of view. The possibility of calculation of the mobility of chemically related drugs in water–methanol–ethanol mixtures using the proposed model is also shown and the produced prediction APD is ∼8%.