Quantitative determination of n-heptane and n-octane using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy with chemometrics methods

Abstract

This paper introduces the terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) used for the quantitative detection of n-heptane volume ratios in 41 n-heptane and n-octane mixtures with the concentration range of 0–100% at the intervals of 2.5%. Among 41 samples, 33 were used for calibration and the remaining 8 for validation. Models of chemometrics methods, including partial least squares (PLS) and back propagation-artificial neural network (BP-ANN), were built between the THz-TDS and the n-heptane percentage. To evaluate the quality of the built models, we calculated the correlation coefficient (R) and root-mean-square errors (RMSE) of calibration and validation models. R and RMSE of two methods were close to 1 and 0 within acceptable levels, respectively, demonstrating that the combination of THz-TDS and chemometrics methods is a potential and promising tool for further quantitative detection of nalkanes.