Exploiting kinetic spectrophotometric determination of captopril, an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, in a multi-pumping flow system

The implementation of a differential kinetic spectrophotometric method for the determination of angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors in pharmaceutical formulations is described. The determination method was based on the monitoring (350 nm) of the reaction between captopril and iodate, in the presence of iodide, versus time and was fully automated by exploiting the multi-pumping flow concept. The developed multi-pumping flow system included four discretely actuated solenoid micro-pumps as unique flow manifold active components. The automatic control of the solenoid micro-pumps, under time-based and pulse-counting routines, allowed the implementation of a reliable and versatile analytical determination, with the additional advantage of permitting a runtime access to important analytical parameters, such as flow rate, sample insertion and reagent addition synchronisation, facilitating this way the establishment of an approach for kinetic measurements, directly due to the efficient solution handling and accurate timing control. A linear range of determination was verified for captopril concentrations between 10.0 and 60.0 μg mL −1 with a sample throughput of about 100 determinations per hour. The results were in agreement with those obtained by the reference procedure with relative deviations between 1.81 and 4.48%.