QUANTITATIVE FOURIER-DOMAIN ANALYSIS .2. DETERMINATION OF BOUNDARY-CONDITIONS

A new approach for determining the boundary conditions of a Fourier-domain data set prior to performing quantitative multicomponent analysis has been developed. Processing boundary conditions were determined by calculating the condition number of the calibration matrix which contains the models used to describe the chemical system being studied. Once the boundary conditions for the Fourier-domain data set were determined, the Kalman filter was used to estimate the concentration of individual components in a multicomponent sample. Synthetic data were first analyzed to determine both the feasibility of the data-analysis method and the effect that background variations would have on the concentration estimates. Raw interferograms of multicomponent samples, collected with the use of Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, were also analyzed. Validation samples were analyzed to verify the chosen boundary conditions.