Factor Analysis of Pharmaceutical Solutions

Abstract

There is an increasing trend in manufacturing and service industries for chemical analysis to be removed from the laboratory and to be undertaken on-site within the production environment. At the same time, a wide variety of statistical and mathematical techniques have been developed which can handle and aid the interpretation of chemical data. One such technique that has received considerable attention is factor analysis. Many analgesic tablets contain the components paracetamol, aspirin and caffeine. The UV absorption peaks attributed to these constituents severely overlap in the wavelength range used for their determination, and these components would traditionally need separating, for example by HPLC, to allow identification. An alternative approach is to apply a mathematical technique to separate the spectra, and factor analysis achieves this. An application of factor analysis is illustrated for the direct and simultaneous determination of paracetamol, aspirin and caffeine, in an analgesic tablet, from UV spectra without prior separation. The qualitative composition of the tablets is confirmed, and quantitative results using the Target Transform Factor Analysis algorithm are in good agreement with declared values.