Hi David,

yes. People use VIS-NIR and PLS regression. Surely you should calibrate your system with known PAH concentrations, so it will be very difficult to use spectroscopy without any GC or HPLC. Detection limits etc. will become evident with PLS results.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2014.05.022

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/160360

Best regards

Thomas

Thank you so much, Thomas! VIS-NIR and PLSR are exactly the mothods I want to try. For the low concentration levels of PAHs, I have been also worried about the extremely low S/N level of spectroscopy without any GC or HPLC. Well, even with a large amout e.g. PPM level in soil, we still can't use only spectroscopy to detect them? Thanks for your answer!

Thank you, Abhishek! I'll read links and PDFs above for said query.

Best regards!

David

Hi David,

yes you can. 20 years ago we used a field method to get an overview of the contamination of the soil with PAH (PAK) in the area of a former munition plant.

We dissolved the soil in acetone/hexane and filtered the extract. A drop of the extract was put on a chromatographic plate. The spots were inspected with UV light by different wavelength and in the dark. In relation to an other plate on which we had spotted different standard solutions of the PAH we get the information whether the soil was contaminated and the information about the concentration range.