A new multi-wavelength analysis method for estimation of total organic carbon in urban wastewater using UV/Vis spectrometry

Total organic carbon (TOC) is an important parameter to evaluate the organic pollution of water. A novel method to rapidly detect TOC of wastewater with UV/Vis spectroanalysis is presented in this paper. UV/Vis absorption spectra in the range of 250∼450 nm were utilised for regression and prediction. Multi-wavelength regression procedure was discussed, and boosting method was used to improve the accuracy of prediction. Experiments show that better prediction result can be gained by this adaptive method than by the traditional regression algorithms, such as PLS, non-linear PLS and RBF neural network. Meanwhile, the improved regression model shows a good correlation between the estimated TOC values and the chemical analysis values.