Determination of ternary solutions concentration in liquid-liquid extraction by the use of attenuated total reflectance-fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and multivariate data analysis

A simple and rapid Fourier transform infrared-attenuated total reflectance (FTIR-ATR) spectroscopic chemometric method was developed to determine the concentration of solute and solvent in the raffinate layer in a liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) process using partial least squares (PLS) regression. Five type I extraction systems were used with different solute-solvent affinity. The developed model (correlation coefficient from 0.91 to 0.99) was validated with known concentration samples, and in all cases the difference was not larger than 0.5%w. The LLE for the five extraction systems was carried out in a three-stage crosscurrent extraction process, quantifying the solute and solvent with the chemometric model developed. The results were used to calculate the stage and overall stage efficiencies for the five systems. This method showed to be fast and precise for the quantification of ternary systems in LLE.