Author(s)

Tais Cristina Filippe¹, Luana Mayumi Takahasi Marques¹, Heloise G. Knapik², Júlio César Rodrigues de Azevedo^1*, Jorge Costa Pereira³

¹Department of Chemistry and Biology, Federal University of Technology—Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.
²Department of Hydraulic and Sanitation, Federal University of Technology—Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.
³Department of Chemistry, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) can be originated from autochthonous or allochthonous sources, where allochthonous DOM can be from pedogenic sources (humic substances—HSs) or anthropogenicsources (wastewater). The analysis of fluorescence emission, excitation, synchronous or excitation-emission matrix (EEM) have been used to identify the main source or probable contribution of dissolved compounds, such as humic acids (HA), fulvic acids (FA) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) from sewage, but does not quantify. Fluorescence emission is a powerful technique to detect and qualify organic dissolved compounds but fails in quantitative aspects. In this work, we propose an in situ method for direct determination of DOC using synchronous fluorescence spectra with independent component analysis (ICA). Well known standard solutions were used for method development and validation. In this work, we show that it is possible to predict the number of independent contributions using an unsupervised method based on iterative Principal Component Analysis and Independent Component Analysis (PCA-ICA) approach over combined matrix results. Within these results it’s also possible to see that with a very small amount of independent components it is possible to describe environmental samples of HA, FA and primary productivity (PP).

Independent Component Analysis, Dissolved Organic Carbon, Spectra Deconvolution, Synchronized Fluorescence

Filippe, T. , Marques, L. , Knapik, H. , Azevedo, J. and Pereira, J. (2019) Evaluation of Dissolved Organic Carbon Using Synchronized Fluorescence Emission Spectra and Unsupervised Method of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 11, 244-279. doi: 10.4236/jwarp.2019.113015.