MULTICOMPONENT DETERMINATIONS BY A MEMBRANE-DISCRIMINATED GAS PHASE ANALYZER AND SUCCESSIVE REGRESSION IN THE FIDUCIARY REGION

A membrane-discriminated gas phase analyzer is proposed for multicomponent determinations. Nitrogengas flows countercurrent through outer and inner channels in a tube-in-tube arrangement. The onlycommunication between the two channels occurs through a 500μm aperture covered by a porous PTFEmembrane. A mixture of organic compounds (up to four components) is injected into the inner channelby a heated backflushed injector and the sample components diffusing into the outer channel aremonitored by a flame ionization detector (FID). A calibration set, consisting of pure components, binary,ternary and quaternary mixtures (a total of 64 samples), provides the known data base: temporal profilesof the FID output as a function of sample composition, Although the overall response behavior is nota linearly additive function of individual analyte concentrations, the use of successive inverse multiplelinear regression (while continually altering the choice of the calibration samples considered for theforward regression, on the basis of the most recent values of the predicted unknown sample composition)is shown to yield analytical results for unknown samples that are in good agreement with their true values.

MULTICOMPONENT DETERMINATIONS BY A MEMBRANE-DISCRIMINATED GAS PHASE ANALYZER AND SUCCESSIVE REGRESSION IN THE FIDUCIARY REGION