Simultaneous use infrared spectroscopy and mass spectrometry for on-line analysis of complicated process and environmental samples

Contamination of environment is still increasing, and legislation of reducing for environmental exhausts is tightening. Numerous contaminated sites exist, which are caused by large cities, industry, traffic, energy production, etc. In industry a comprehensive management of production and quality control is essential to speed up production rate, to improve the quality of products, to minimize losses and to avoid contamination of the environment. For those aims there is also an increasing demand for reliable on-line analytical techniques. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and mass spectrometry (MS) have been applied successfully to on-line monitoring of industrial processes and waste streams. The aim of this project was to evaluate the benefits of the simultaneous use of two different analytical methods, FTIR and MS, for on-line analysis of complicated environmental and process samples. This aim is obtained by developing a mathematical method, which identifies and quantifies all single components of a complex sample using the multicomponent spectra measured by both FTIR and MS instruments. These two analytical methods have been used in different industrial process monitoring cases in order to find out in more detail the benefits and drawbacks of each method and to compare the results obtained with both methods. Mathematical algorithms for resolving multicomponent spectra have been developed for both FTIR and MS techniques. The results obtained show that identification and quantitation of unknowns based on the combined multicomponent spectrum of FTIR and MS techniques is more reliable than using a spectrum of only one technique.