Simultaneous determination of thorium and uranyl ions by optode spectra and chemometric techniques

A sensitive optode was fabricated from a recently synthesized ligand (triazene-1,3-di(2-methoxyphenyl)). Simultaneous determination of thorium and uranium in aqueous samples were performed by this optode in conjunction with partial least squares (PLS) and artificial neural network (ANN) techniques. The measured absorbances at 27 selected wavelengths were used for training. A PLS1 model with 4 and 3 latent variables for thorium and uranium respectively, a PLS2 model with 4 latent variables and a principal component ANN model (4-2-2) with linear transfer function after hidden and output layers were created. Relative error of prediction for PLS1, PLS2 and ANN models in synthetic mixtures were 7.40%, 7.12% and 5.04% respectively.