Two new spectrophotometric approaches to the multicomponent analysis of the acetaminophen and caffeine in tablets by classical least-squares and principal component regression techniques.

Classical least-squares (CLS) and principal component regression (PCR) techniques were proposed for the simultaneous analysis of tablets containing acetaminophen and caffeine without using a chemical separation procedure. The chemometric calibrations were prepared by measuring the absorbances values at the 15 wavelengths in the spectral region 215–285 nm and by using a training set of the mixtures of both drugs in 0.1 M HCl. The obtained chemometric calibrations were used for the estimation of acetaminophen and caffeine in samples. The numerical calculations were performed with the ‘maple V’ software. By applying two techniques to synthetic mixtures, the mean recoveries and the relative standard deviations in the CLS and PCR techniques were found as 99.5 and 1.29, 99.7 and 1.00% for acetaminophen and 99.9 and 1.92, 100.0 and 1.178% for caffeine, respectively. Our results were compared with those obtained previously by one of us considering HPLC method as a reference method. These two methods were successfully applied to a pharmaceutical tablet formulation of two drugs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]