Target Factor Analysis Lab Report

Objective: The goal of the experiment was to use UV/VIS spectroscopy to collect data to quantify acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine from a migraine tablet where there is heavy spectral interference using Target Factor Analysis1. The migraine tablet has other ingredients in it like FD&C blue #1, stearic acid, and saccharin. Saccharin is the ingredient thought to have the biggest interference and was used as the experimental basis2.

Instruments:
UV/VIS spectroscopy was used to analyze the absorption spectra of the many solutions in this experiment. It was chosen for its ability to collect absorption data quickly and efficiently. A Target Factor Analysis program was used to treat the UV/VIS data collected. Target Factor Analysis was used as the calculation method instead of CLSR due to it taking into account the interference2.

Discussion: Table 1 is the calibration matrix
This is one of the reasons why TFA was used and why there is some error in the calculation of the concentrations. Error also could have been caused from reference cuvette of 0.01 M HCl used in the spectroscopy absorbing the light energy over multiple runs. Figure 2 shows all calibration spectra (color of your choice) and the four unknown spectra. Table 4 shows max and corresponding absorption coefficient of pure caffeine, aspirin, and acetaminophen. Caffeine has the largest absorptivity coefficient of 2637.202158 and Acetaminophen and aspirin have considerably lower coefficients of 1086.751132 and 1257.296755 respectively. This data has a correlation with the solubility, structure, and molar mass of the compounds. Caffeine has the largest molar mass and the solubility of caffeine at 25 oC is 2g/100 mL, the highest of the three analytes. This difference in solubility is due to the polarity of the structure of caffeine when compared to the polarity of the structure of the other