Artificial neural networks for simultaneous spectrophotometric differential kinetic determination of Co(II) and V(IV)

A method for simultaneous analysis of V(IV) and Co(II) has been developed by using artificial neural network (ANN). This method is based on the difference of the chemical reaction rate of V(IV) and Co(II) with Fe(III) in the presence of chromogenic reagent, 1,10-phenanthroline. The reduced product of the reaction, Fe(II), can form a colored complex with 1,10-phenanthroline and make a visible spectrophotometric signal for indirect monitoring of the V(IV) and Co(II) concentrations. Feed forward neural networks have been trained to quantify considered metal ions in mixtures under optimum conditions. The networks were shown to be capable of correlating reduced spectral kinetic data using principal component analysis (PCA) of mixtures with individual metal ion. In this way an ANN containing three layers of nodes was trained. Sigmoidal and linear transfer functions were used in the hidden and output layers, respectively, to facilitate nonlinear calibration. Both V(IV) and Co(II) were analyzed in the concentration range of 0.1–4.0 μg ml−1. The proposed method was also applied satisfactorily to the determination of considered metal ions in several synthetic and water samples.