Quantifying PAHs in water by three-way fluorescence spectra and second-order calibration methods

It is still difficult to determine the concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons accurately in natural water by fluorescence technique because of their low solubility, different fluorescent intensity, and the complex interferents from water environments. In this work, three-way fluorescence spectra combined with three methods including three-way parallel factor analysis, multi-way partial least square with residual bilinearization and unfolded partial least square with residual bilinearization were used to predict the concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at the μg L−1 level in reservoir and river water, respectively. The prediction abilities of these methods on different analytes were evaluated by validation sets. The results demonstrate that unfolded partial least square with residual bilinearization yields the optimal results with relative error less than or equal to 6% for phenanthrene, pyrene, anthracene and fluorene, and 35% for acenaphthene and fluoranthene in different water backgrounds.