CARBON-MINERAL MATERIALS CLASSIFICATION BY PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS
Sapropels are multilayer deposits accumulating on the bottom of fresh water bodies. They are complex multicomponent systems containing both organic and mineral parts. The wide possibilities of using sapropels cause interest in studying their properties, processing methods and new sapropel-based materials. The specialized Sapropel Committee was established at the beginning of the last century. It carries out a large amount of work related to the study and processing of sapropels. In this paper we study the possibility of applying chemometric algorithms for the classification of carbon-mineral materials obtained by calcination of organic and mineral sapropels in an argon atmosphere, as well as products of acidic, alkali and steam treatment of initial carbon-mineral materials. For the chemometric data processing the principal component analysis is chosen as one of the most widely used chemometrical algorithms. In addition to the direct application, the principal component analysis serves as the basis for a group of other analogous chemometric algorithms. It is based on the decomposition of the initial data matrix into scores and loadings matrixes. In this paper, carbon-mineral materials chemometric classification possibilities by their physicochemical characteristics and elemental composition are studied. It is shown that carbon-mineral materials can be classified by initial sapropel type using any type of incomplete data set as well as data sets of various combinations. Based on the obtained results, it is concluded that it is possible to predict certain characteristics of carbon-mineral materials with use of the principal component analysis from the results of simpler and faster measurements.