Quantification of pH-dependent speciation of organic compounds with spectroscopy and chemometrics

•Speciation of organic acids was reconstructed from UV/Vis and fluorescence spectra.•PMF and PARAFAC also permit quantification in multi-component solutions.•Fixed components were used to reconstruct the pH from speciation of organic acids.

Fluorescence and UV/Vis spectra of aqueous solutions with numerous organic compounds are a superposition of single spectra of the chemical species present. Thus, an isolation of individual spectra with chemometrics is required for their quantification. We investigated UV/Vis spectra and fluorescence excitation-emission matrices of vanillic acid, salicylic acid, phenoxyacetic acid and phthalic acid with positive matrix factorization (PMF) and non-negativity constrained parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) in combination with the law of mass action. In consideration of the pH-dependent speciation of organic acids, we first reconstructed the pH-specific spectra of each compound. Using these spectra as known components in a constrained algorithm, we could successfully quantify species of multiple compounds and reconstruct the solution pH. In addition, we estimated the uncertainty of reconstructed spectra and concentrations in order to assess the most probable number of components for PMF/PARAFAC. Therefore, we could derive a framework to reconstruct the number of relevant species and their individual concentration present in spectroscopic data of aqueous solutions containing multiple organic compounds.

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