Determining uncertainty in a simple UV-Vis spectrometry method employing dimethyl carbonate as green solvent for lead determination in water

Abstract The growth of industrial and urban centers promotes water quality issues. Water is one of the greatest sources of human exposure to lead. This study presents a simple, inexpensive, and fast analytical method for determining lead water employing DLLME followed by a UV-Vis spectrophotometer. Dimethyl carbonate (DMC) is used for the first time as the extraction solvent for lead determination. Carbonates are non-toxic, biodegradable green solvents obtained from renewable resources. For optimization, a two-level Full-Factorial Design was used; the selected conditions for 5.0-mL water analysis were DDTP 0.1%, 1.0% phosphoric acid, and 1.0 mL of DMC. This method was successfully validated through the assessment of specificity, linearity (from 0.2 to 1.0 mg L -1), accuracy (90.0% to 102.5%), precision (RSD from 2.6% to 15.0%), and LOQ of 0.2 mg L-1. Bottom-up measurement uncertainty evaluation provides relative uncertainty values around 13% to14% of lead concentration in water.