Chemometrics-assisted excitation–emission fluorescence analytical data for rapid and selective determination of optical brighteners in the presence of uncalibrated interferences

• Simultaneous determination of CBS-X and CXT in the laundry powders and environmental samples
• Handling the direct interfering effect of a complex matrix by modeling system in the presence of uncalibrated interference
• Discriminating between CBS-X and CXT by employing trilinear second-order calibration
• Unique decomposition of the three-way data array by PARAFAC, SWATLD and APTLD

This study describes a novel approach for the simultaneous determination of CBS-X and CXT as widely used optical brighteners in household detergent, by combining the advantage of the high sensitivity of molecular fluorescence, and the selectivity of second-order chemometric methods. The proposed method is assisted by second-order chemometric analyses employing the PARAFAC, SWATLD and APTLD that help us to determine CBS-X and CXT in laundry powders and environmental samples, through the unique decomposition of the three-way data array. Proposed method can provide the extraction of relative concentrations of the analytes, as well as the spectral profiles. This approach achieves the second-order advantage and in principle could be able to overcome the spectral uncalibrated interference problems in the determination of CBS-X and CXT at the ng g− 1 level.By spiking the known concentrations of these compounds to the real samples, the accuracy of the proposed methods was validated and recoveries of the spiked values were calculated. High recoveries (90.00%–113.33%) for the spiked laundry powders and real environmental samples indicate the present method successfully faces this complex challenge without the necessity of applying separation and preconcentration steps in environmental contaminations.

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