Quantification of Ethyl-Cellulose Coated Vitamin C Using Near Infrared Spectroscopy

Fourier Transform Near-Infrared Spectroscopy was used to compare six different concentrations of vitamin c mixed with ethyl cellulose. This was done by measuring the absorbance of a solid sample. In the spectra it was observed that there were three distinct peaks for different functional groups and overtones including oxygen-hydrogen stretch, carbon-hydrogen stretch, and oxygen-hydrogen bend. At these peaks, the spectra were ordered nicely from lowest to highest vitamin c concentration and lowest to highest absorbance. This is very promising as the current method for quantifying vitamin c in ethyl cellulose involves boiling the solution, which denatures the vitamin c, potentially messing up the results. In industry a new method using NIRS would save time and money, by reducing overage added to products. Chemometric analysis is currently being prepared to get a correlation coefficient.