Comparison of various chemometric evaluation approaches for on-line FT-NIR transmission and FT-MIR/ATR spectroscopic data of methyl methacrylate solution polymerization

For the evaluation of vibrational spectroscopic data acquired on-line to a chemical reaction a broad range of different chemometric algorithms is available. The present study reports the comparative results obtained by different chemometric techniques from the data acquired by light-fiber coupled Fourier-transform near infrared (FT-NIR) transmission spectroscopy and Fourier-transform mid-infrared (FT-NIIR) spectroscopy in the attenuated total reflection (ATR) mode to monitor the solution polymerization of methyl methacrylate (MMA). We have found that the results obtained by the application of multivariate curve resolution (MCR) methods to the MIR spectral data acquired during the polymerization of MMA are quite comparable to the results derived by partial least-squares calibration. In the case of the NIR data univariate calibration yields somewhat poorer results than multivariate calibration and MCR, but still inside an acceptable range. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.