Multivariate monitoring of soybean oil ethanolysis by FTIR.

In this work, an analytical procedure was developed to monitor the ethanolysis of degummed soybean oil (DSO) using Fourier-transformed mid-infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and methods of multivariate analysis such as principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares regression (PLS). The triglycerides (reagents) and ethyl esters (products) involved in ethanolysis were shown to have similar FTIR spectra. However, when the FTIR spectra derived from seven standard mixtures of triolein and ethyl oleate were treated by PCA at the region that represents the CO stretching vibration of ester groups (1700-1800cm(-1)), only two principal components (PC) were shown to capture 99.