Increasing the scope and power of flow-injection analysis through chemometric approaches

The objective of this paper is to illustrate how chemometrics can enhance the scope and power of flow injection analysis (FIA) by considering a few simple but representative cases where the ability of chemometrics to improve performance is not readily apparent. In principle, there are two phases when chemometrics can be usefully combined with FIA: first when developing an FIA method and, second, when treating raw data acquired from an FIA detection system. The most obvious application of chemometrics for the FIA practitioner is to use experimental design to replace the obsolete, but too often used one-variable-at-a-time approach when optimising an FIA method. Therefore, methods for screening variables and system optimisation are discussed. Raw data acquired from most FIA systems are first-order data, containing information about the dispersed sample plug. However, the information that is extracted when using FIA for routine purposes is of zero-order: predominantly peak height values. It is shown by a simple example that a chemometric approach in such cases can again provide additional useful information about the sample. First-order spectral data and second-order data more or less require a chemometrics approach for successful analysis, and examples of such applications are briefly discussed.