Simultaneous determination of organotin compounds by hydride generation–gas phase molecular absorption spectrometry

This study describes the determination of ternary mixtures of dimethyltin chloride (DMT), trimethyltin chloride (TMT) and monobutyltin chloride (BT) by hydride generation–gas phase molecular absorption spectrometry and the application of different chemometric methods: principal components regression (PCR) and partial least squares (PLS). The two methods are applied to the absorption spectra of mixtures of DMT, TMT and BT. Two different experimental designs are tested for the mixtures, a triangular design and a central composite design. The models obtained from the triangular design offer the best prediction results. The effects of the number of working wavelengths and the number of factors included in the calibration model is studied and a different behaviour is seen for each compound and calibration model. The methods are applied to the analysis of artificial aqueous samples containing different concentrations of DMT, TMT and BT species. No significant differences are observed between the calibration models investigated.