Comparative study of the continuous wavelet transform, derivative and partial least squares methods applied to the overlapping spectra for the simultaneous quantitative resolution of ascorbic acid and acetylsalicylic acid in effervescent tablets.

The simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of ascorbic acid (AA) and acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) in effervescent tablets in the presence of the overlapping spectra was accomplished by the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), derivative spectrophotometry (DS) and partial least squares (PLS) approaches without using any chemical pre-treatment. CWT and DS calibration equations for AA and ASA were obtained by measuring the CWT and DS amplitudes corresponding to zero-crossing points of spectra obtained by plotting continuous wavelet coefficients and first-derivative absorbance values versus the wavelengths, respectively. The PLS calibration was constructed by using the concentration set and its full absorbance data consisting of 850 points from 220 to 305 nm in the range of 210-310 nm. These three methods were tested by analyzing the synthetic mixtures of the above drugs and they were applied to the real samples containing two commercial pharmaceutical preparations of subjected drugs. A comparative study was carried out by using the experimental results obtained from three analytical methodologies and precise and accurate results were obtained.