Trace determination of carbendazim, fuberidazole and thiabendazole in water by application of multivariate calibration to cross-sections of three-dimensional excitation-emission matrix fluorescence.

The simultaneous determination of carbendazim, fuberidazole and thiabendazole was accomplished by cross-section (CS) fluorimetry in combination with multivariate calibration algorithms. The total luminescence information of the compounds was used to optimise the linear trajectories of the CS. A comparison between principal component regression (PCR) and two partial least squares (PLS) algorithms, PLS-1 and PLS-2, with different pre-processing methodologies was made. The final model, which applied the PLS-1 method, built using pesticide standard and emission spectra, was successfully used for the determination of these compounds in synthetic mixtures. However, a different PLS-1 multivariate calibration model, based on CS through the total luminescence spectroscopic data, was necessary for determining the cited pesticides in water samples. Mean centring was the best pre-processing technique in both PLS-1 models. This later calibration model was built from ultra-pure water samples spiked with known carbendazim, fuberidazole and thiabendazole concentrations, after solid-phase extraction (SPE). The method, which had a precision better than 5%, was shown to be suitable for carbendazim, fuberidazole and thiabendazole monitoring in water samples at trace levels.