Spectrophotometric determination of manganese(VII) using benzyltriphenylphosphoniumchloride as a new reagent and application of artificial neural network to extending the dynamic range of determination

Abstract

A simple and selective spectrophotometric method is proposed for the determination of trace amounts of manganese. The method is based on the extraction of manganese as a MnO2-benzyltriphenylphosphoniumchloride ion pair with chloroform. An artificial neural network (ANN) has been applied to the handling of the spectrophotometric data of this complex in the organic phase to extend the dynamic range of manganese determination (0.020–6.0 μg/mL). A three-layer back-propagation network (50:75:1) was used with root-mean-square error (rmse) 0.001 and momentum (m) 0.8 overall. The application of BP-ANN makes it possible to extend the dynamic range of the determination of manganese from its narrow linear range of 0.020–2.5 μg/mL to the dynamic range 0.020–6.0 μg/mL.