Chemometric Approach to the Elemental Composition of Ethereal Oil Plant Materials

Abstract

The aim of the present study is the effective application of chemometric approach to the elemental composition of a data set of ten ethereal oil plant materials. The contents of 28 essential and toxic mineral elements at main, minor and trace level are determined in each sample by means of direct solid sampling electrothermal vapourization inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ETV-ICP-OES) and are subjected to hierarchical and non-hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis. Z-transformation of the raw data, Ward’s method of linkage and squared Euclidean distance as similarity measure are used in order to discover appropriate linkage between the plant materials and between the chemical parameters characterizing them. Thus, the investigated plant samples are classified, depending on their chemical composition. On the other hand, the mineral elements are categorized into several patterns which are related to the specific soil characteristics.