General statement of the problem of substance analysis by the products of photochemical reactions

The aim of this study was to formulate the problem and develop a formal procedure for structure determination and substance quantification by the products of its photochemical reaction. This problem appears in studies of rapid photochemical processes, when the lifetime of the initial substance is shorter than the time to the moment of its registration (ecology, toxic substances, etc.). Algorithms of solving corresponding inverse problems are considered, and procedure including several steps is proposed. It includes the determination of the composition and concentrations of mixture components by the spectra of a test substance using the theory of molecular spectra; the recovery of the quantitative composition of the initial substance by the structural formulae of the products of a chemical reaction; and the determination of the initial concentrations of substances and the kinetics of the process on the basis of the developed theory of chemical transformations using information on the reactants and their concentrations. The application of the proposed approach is demonstrated on examples.