Exploiting the oxidative coupling reaction of MBTH for indapamide determination

The oxidative coupling reaction between aromatic amines and 3-methylbenzothiazolin-2-one hydrazone (MBTH) in the presence of cerium(IV) has been extensively used with quantitative analytical purposes. Nevertheless, a literature survey reveals that different wavelengths (visible range) can be used to monitor the reaction products when using MBTH and Ce(IV) as colour developing reagents.In the present work, the oxidative coupling reaction of indapamide (an oral antihypertensive diuretic drug) with MBTH in the presence of cerium(IV) was evaluated using distinct reaction approaches and was implemented in an automated multipumping flow system. The developed methodology was applied in the spectrophotometric control of the drug in pharmaceutical formulations. The optimization of the proposed multipumping flow system was performed by using an experimental design approach, namely by exploiting a Plackett–Burman factorial design and a central cubic faces design.This work revealed the formation of products with different reaction kinetics, chemical stabilities and absorbance spectra, depending on the sequence of addition of the reagents. By exploiting a specific sequence in the addition of reagents, the proposed automatic system allowed the rapid quantification of indapamide in pharmaceutical formulations, with a determination rate of about 25 h−1, and a relative deviation under 2.1% when comparing with the reference procedure. Detection limit was approximately 1 mg L−1.