Abstract
High performance liquid chromatography-photodiode array (HPLC-PDA) method has been employed for the simultaneous determination of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) in aspirin C effervescent tablets. Chromatographic separation of ascorbic acid (AA) and acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) was performed by reversed-phase using a Betasil C
18
column with particle size of 3 µm, 150 mm × 4.6 mm I.D. Optimum separation was achieved in isocratic mode with a binary mobile phase (mixture of water and acetonitrile with 0.1% of formic acid, 75:25, v/v) at a flow rate of 1.0 mL min
−1
. Recovery of the target compounds was obtained more than 98% with good quality parameters: linearity (r
2
> 0.997), limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) values between 1.4 × 10
−3
and 5.1 × 10
−4
mg mL
−1
, and intra-day and interday precisions with relative standard deviation (RSD) lower than 2.1%. The content of the analyzed samples ascorbic and acetylsalicylic acid was found 238.23 and 393.49 mg, respectively, which are very close to the label claimed by the manufacturer in aspirin C effervescent tablets. Therefore, this method can be proposed for routine analysis of these compounds in aspirin C effervescent tablets.