Differentiation of weathered oils using infrared indexes and self-organizing maps

摘要

Recent estimations considered that up to 40% of oil spills in the US governmental jurisdiction remained unidentified. Many circumstances may be behind this striking figure, one of them the difficulties in the analytical characterization of the test aliquots and the subsequent extraction of information. In this paper a simple approach to handle complex datasets (organized as oils x weathering aliquots x analytical variables) is proposed. It considers self-organizing maps to gather information about: (i) the samples, and, so, whether the oils can be differentiated; (ii) the weathering of the oils; and (iii) the analytical variables (in this case, mid-IR spectral indexes) that characterize each oil and weathering.