QUANTITATIVE ASPECTS OF NEAR-INFRARED FOURIER-TRANSFORM RAMAN-SPECTROSCOPY

Three fundamental behaviors of vibrational spectroscopy data manipulation routinely associated with Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy are evaluated for near-infrared (NIR) Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy. Spectral reproducibility, spectral subtraction and sensitivity are examined relative to the NIR FT-Raman experiment. Quantitative predictive ability is compared for identical sets of samples containing mixtures of the three xylene isomers. Partial least-square analysis is used to compare predictive ability. IR performance is found to be better than Raman, though the potential for method development using NIR FT-Raman is shown to be quite promising.