Skip to main content
Carien Nothnagel

    Carien Nothnagel

    Pelchem, a commercial subsidiary of Necsa (South African Nuclear Energy Corporation), produces a range of commercial fluorocarbon products while driving research and development initiatives to support the fluorine product portfolio. One... more
    Pelchem, a commercial subsidiary of Necsa (South African Nuclear Energy Corporation), produces a range of commercial fluorocarbon products while driving research and development initiatives to support the fluorine product portfolio. One such initiative is to develop improved analytical techniques to analyse product composition during development and to quality assure produce. Generally the C-F type products produced by Necsa are in a solution of anhydrous HF, and cannot be directly analyzed with traditional techniques without derivatisation. A technique such as vibrational spectroscopy, that can analyze these products directly without further preparation, will have a distinct advantage. However, spectra of mixtures of similar compounds are complex and not suitable for traditional quantitative regression analysis. Multivariate data analysis (MVA) can be used in such instances to exploit the complex nature of spectra to extract quantitative information on the composition of mixtures. ...