Chemometrics as a tool to analyse complex chemical mixtures: Environmental forensics and fate of oil spills. PhD thesis

Chemical characterisation of contaminant mixtures is important for environmental
forensics and risk assessment. The great challenge in future research lies in develop-
ing suitable, rapid, reliable and objective methods for analysis of the composition of
complex chemical mixtures. This thesis describes the development of such methods
for assessing the identity (chemical fingerprinting) and fate (e.g. biodegradation) of
petroleum hydrocarbon mixtures. The methods comply with the general concept that
suitable methods must be rapid and inexpensive, objective with limited human in-
tervention and at the same time must consider a substantial fraction of compounds in
the complex mixture. A combination of a) limited sample preparation, b) rapid
chemical screening analysis, c) fast and semi-automatic pre-processing, d) compre-
hensive multivariate statistical data analysis and e) objective data evaluation was
used throughout the thesis.