Combinations of Orthogonal Spectra to Estimate Component Spectra in Multicomponent Mixtures

Abstract

A factor analysis of a set of spectra of multicomponent mixtures yields n orthogonal spectra where n is the number of components in the mixtures. Combinations of these orthogonal spectra, done so as to eliminate the contributions to the spectra from one of the components, yield a set of n – 1 linearly independent abstract spectra. Repetition of this process is used to estimate the spectrum of each of the components without identifying the range of the n-dimensional vector space in which the solution must fall. Several techniques for estimating the appropriate combinations of orthogonal spectra are compared.