A spectrophotometric method for simultaneous determination of trace ions of copper, cobalt, and nickel in the zinc sulfate solution by ultraviolet-visible spectrometry

In the zinc sulfate solution, the concentration ratio of zinc to metal ion impurities can be up to 105, which causes impurity ion signals to be severely masked by the zinc signal. In particular, nickel exhibits a strong nonlinearity. Conventional spectroscopic methods are commonly used to detect multi-component analytes with similar concentrations and require the detection component to be linear to satisfy Beer-Lambert law. In order to solve high concentration ratio and nonlinear problems, a spectrophotometric method combining the extended Kalman filter and derivative methods is proposed to simultaneously determine copper, cobalt and nickel in the zinc sulfate solution by ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy. The derivative method developed by using continuous wavelet transform with a Haar wavelet function was applied to detect copper and cobalt in regions with wavelengths greater than 500 nm, in which the absorbance of zinc and nickel changed to a fixed value, where linear regression graphs for copper and cobalt were established at zero-crossing wavelengths. Extended Kalman filter spectrophotometry is a filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems, so it was proposed to iteratively detect nickel concentration. The detection range was found to be 0.5–5 mg/L for copper, 0.3–3 mg/L for cobalt, and 0.6–6 mg/L. The predicted root mean square error was 0.097 for copper, 0.049 for cobalt, and 0.206 for nickel. The average relative deviations of copper, cobalt, and nickel in 10 sets of mixed solutions were 3.19%, 2.23%, and 4.56%, respectively. The spectrophotometric method studied is suitable for real-time detection and control of trace amounts of copper, cobalt, and nickel in purification process of zinc hydrometallurgy, and can be applied to more fields.