The typical methods to quantify emerging compounds in wastewater are time and reagent consuming
and new methods for its quantification are welcome. This work describes the development and
validation of a Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy methodology for the
quantification of emerging compounds in wastewaters. For this purpose, 180 samples obtained from
an activated sludge wastewater treatment process were analyzed in the range of 200 cm-1 to 14000
cm-1, and further treated by chemometric techniques to develop and validate the quantification models.
The obtained results were found adequate for the prediction of atrazine, paracetamol, and
desloratadine with coefficients of determination (R2) from 0.93 to 0.98 and residual prediction deviation
(RPD) values above three, for the overall (training and validation) data points. These results are very
promising and confirm that this technology can be seen as an alternative for the quantification of
emerging compounds in wastewater.The authors thank the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of
the strategic funding of UID/BIO/044697/2019 unit and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-
FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020
- Programa Operacional Regional do Norte.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
