Simultaneous voltammetric determination of heavy metals by use of crown ether-modified electrodes and chemometrics

Abstract

A three‐sensor array consisting of a graphite‐epoxy composite electrode (GEC), 4‐carboxybenzo‐18‐crown‐6‐GEC and 4‐carboxybenzo‐15‐crown‐5‐GEC was employed for the simultaneous determination of Cd(II), Pb(II) and Hg(II) by differential pulse anodic stripping voltammetry (DPASV). Sensors were firstly studied for the determination of Hg(II); secondly, peak current responses confirmed that all sensors showed differentiated response for the three considered metals. A response model was developed to resolve mixtures of Cd(II), Pb(II) and Hg(II) at the µg L−1 level; Discrete Wavelet Transform was selected as preprocessing tool and artificial neural network used for the modelling of the obtained responses.