A robust chemometrics approach to inferential estimation of supersaturation

The fundamental processes of crystal nucleation and growth are strongly dependent on the concentration of the solute in solution. A significant limitation to the development of reliable rigorous techniques for the modeling, design, and control of crystallization processes has been the difficulty in obtaining highly accurate supersaturation measurements for dense suspensions. Attenuated total reflectance (ATR) Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is coupled with robust chemometrics analysis to provide highly accurate online supersaturation estimation in dense crystal slurries. Supersaturation estimates constructed from robust chemometrics techniques are substantially more accurate than using the conventional approaches for FTIR data analysis