Dedicated mother wavelet in the determination of antimony in the presence of copper.

In this paper, a new signal-processing procedure is applied to the optimization of voltammetric determination of antimony in the presence of copper and the parallel determination of these two elements. The proposed numerical algorithm for the separation of the overlapping peaks utilizes the continuous wavelet transform and the inverse continuous wavelet transform. As the base function, the specially defined dedicated mother wavelet is used. In its construction the ideal, simulated voltammetric peak is intensively exploited. This approach, corresponding to the wavelet theory, gives satisfactory signals separation, even in the cases when they constitute one peak. The possibility of Sb(III) determination is presented in the case of different distances between copper and antimony peaks and also in 10-, 20- and 50-fold excesses of Cu. The parallel determination of Cu(II) and Sb(III) is possible even in the case of a 10-fold excess of copper. The quality of the obtained results fulfills the requirements of validation.