Optimisation algorithms in the case of mineral detection using Raman Analysis

Raman analysis can be used to analyse the existence of minerals in an ore sample. Especially the interest here is to analyse given ore sample rapidly, to find out what minerals it contains. Rapid analysis would enable more rapid exploration of minerals as analysis could be carried out on-site. For this study, ore samples were collected from two mines in Northern Finland, Kittilä and Kevitsa. An optimisation algorithm was constructed to form a linear combination of reference spectra which best represent the measured spectrum from an ore sample. The reference spectra were collected from a public source. It was found that solving for an optimal summation of reference spectra can be a useful tool in finding out the minerals which are abundant in the sample studied.