Near infrared chemo-responsive dye intermediaries spectra-based in-situ quantification of volatile organic compounds

Abstract

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) detection and measurement in materials with near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) have been an unresolved constraint till date. This paper focused on the use of NIRS for rapid detection and quantification of pure VOCs (ethanol, ethyl acetate and acetic acid) in mixed VOCs via employing sensitive intermediary chemo-responsive dyes as capture probes, whose NIRS spectra were scanned, preprocessed and used to build partial least squares (PLS) prediction models. Average predicted rates based on the PLS-built prediction models for the pure VOCs in the mixed VOCs yielded 98.60±17.41%. 78.26% of the pure VOCs prediction rates ranged between 85 and 114% and normally distributed. The high prediction rates achieved imply the technique may be deployed as a panacea to widen the usage scope of NIRS and e-nose based colorimetric sensors for rapid detection and quantification of VOCs content in materials which hitherto had been a constraint for both systems.