Simultaneous Spectrophotometric Determination of Vanillin and Ethyl Maltol in Food by Multivariate Calibration Approach

Both vanillin and ethyl maltol have absorption at UV range, and their absorption spectra are seriously overlapping. In this paper, the chemometric multivariate calibration methods, such as classical least squares (CLS), partial least squares ( PLS) and principal components regression (PCR) were applied to the simultaneous determination of these two compounds in a B-R buffer solution (pH (2.87)). The linear ranges of vanillin and ethyl maltol are 1.0～20.0 mg/L. The limits of detection are (0.478) mg/L and 0.559 mg/L , respectively. These methods were successfully applied to the analysis of food samples with satisfied results.