Investigation of eucalyptus essential oil by using vibrational spectroscopy methods

The essential oils isolated from several Eucalyptus species were analysed fast and non-destructively applying Raman and ATR-IR vibrational spectroscopy methods. The main components of the essential oils can be recognised by both vibrational spectroscopic techniques using the spectral information of the pure terpenoids. Spectroscopic analysis is based on the key bands of the individual volatile substances and therefore allows to discriminate different essential oil profiles of the analysed Eucalyptus species. It has been also found that the spectroscopic data correlate very well with those obtained by GC analysis. Additionally, combination of vibrational spectroscopy and hierarchical cluster analysis provides a fast, easy and reliable method for chemotaxonomy characterisation. All results presented within this study are useful to develop new methods for classification and quantification of various essential oils by using vibrational spectroscopic techniques. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.