Determination of Benzoic Acid

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DETERMINATION OF BENZOIC ACID AND SALICYLIC ACID IN COMMERCIAL BENZOIC AND SALICYLIC ACIDS OINTMENTS BY SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC METHOD IQBAL AHMAD* AND FAIYAZ HM VAID** *Dubai Pharmacy College, P.O. Box 19099, Dubai, United Arab Emirates **Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Karachi, Karachi-75270, Pakistan ABSTRACT Commercial benzoic acid and salicylic acid ointments have been analyzed for benzoic acid and salicylic acid content by using a spectrophotometric method. Since benzoic acid and salicylic acid exhibit overlapping spectra, absorbance measurements are made at two wavelengths, i.e. 271 nm and 303 nm in ethanol (96%v/v) for simultaneous determination of the two compounds. The method is direct and involves only one step of absorbance measurement in the assay. The precision of the method, based on the analysis of synthetic mixtures of the two compounds, is within 2%. The recoveries of benzoic acid and salicylic acid in the ointments range from 99.9 to 100.6% and 99.5 to 101.3%, respectively and are comparable with those of the USP method (99.8 to 100.5% and 100.2 to 101.7%, respectively). The proposed method is simple, rapid, precise and convenient for the assay of benzoic acid and salicylic acid in commercial preparations. Keywords: Benzoic acid; salicylic acid; spectrophotometric assay; commercial ointments. INTRODUCTION The official methods for the assay of benzoic acid and salicylic acid in compound benzoic acid ointment or benzoic and salicylic acids ointment are based on acidbase titration (benzoic acid) and spectrophotometric determination (salicylic acid) (BP, 2003) or column chromatographic separation of the two compounds followed by spectrophotometric determination (USP, 2004). Spectrofluorimetric (Adams and Miller, 1978) and isoabsorptive methods (Sethi, 1985) have been proposed for the assay of benzoic acid and

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