Simultaneous titration of ternary alkaline–earth mixtures employing a potentiometric electronic tongue

A fast novel complexometric titration procedure is proposed, in which equivalence concentrations were determined using a potentiometric electronic tongue. The titration consists in a reduced number of fixed additions of titrant and the recording of the potentials of an array of ion-selective electrodes with cross-selectivity response. The generated data (number of sensors × number of additions) were used as input data to an artificial neural network response model previously trained with standards. The application of this procedure is demonstrated with automated EDTA titrations of Ca2+, Mg2+ and Sr2+ mixtures, up to 3.3 mM total ion concentration. In the studied case, good results predicting the three concentrations were obtained using five 1 mL fixed volume additions plus the readings of eight sensors. The unique additional step required was the pH buffering of the sample to pH 9.5. Good comparisons were observed between obtained and expected concentrations for the three cations with the external validation samples (n = 17, with RMSE values of 0.18, 0.28 and 0.32 mM for Ca2+, Mg2+ and Sr2+, respectively). The proposed procedure was applied to mineral waters and compared with reference methods.