Simultaneous determination of three organophosphorus pesticides residues in vegetables using continuous-flow chemiluminescence with artificial neural network calibration

In this article, a continuous-flow chemiluminescence (CL) system with artificial neural network calibration is proposed for simultaneous determination of three organophosphorus pesiticides residues. This method is based on the fact that organophosphorus pesticides can be decomposed into orthophosphate with potassium peroxodisulphate as oxidant under ultraviolet radiation and that the decomposing kinetic characteristics of the organophosphorus pesticides with different molecular structure are significantly different. The produced orthophosphate can react with molybdate and vanadate to form the vanadomolybdophosphoric heteropoly acid, which can oxidize luminol to produce intense CL emission. The CL intensity of the solution was measured and recorded every 2 s in the range of 0–250 s. The obtained data were processed chemometrically by use of a three-layered feed-forward artificial neural network trained by back-propagation learning algorithm, in which input node, hidden node and output nodes were 65, 21 and 3, respectively. The proposed multi-residue analysis method was successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of the three organophosphorus pesticides residue in some vegetables samples.