Assessment of resin formulations and determination of the formaldehyde to urea molar ratio by near‐ and mid‐infrared spectroscopy and multivariate data analysis

The molar ratios of formaldehyde (F) to urea (U) of three resin formulations in the range from 0.90 to 1.49 have been analyzed by means of Attenuated Total Reflection‐Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR‐FTIR) spectroscopy and Fourier Transform‐Near‐Infrared (FT‐NIR) spectroscopy. Application of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to the spectra (MIR and NIR) allowed to separate them according to the molar ratio and to distinguish between two groups of resins. Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) allowed classification of new resin samples with high model distances between the classes. Partial Least Squares Regression (PLS‐R) models based on MIR (NIR) spectra resulted in high coefficients of determination (R2) values, low errors, and high residual prediction deviations (RPD). To confirm the reproducibility of the process and to carefully evaluate twice all multivariate analysis results obtained, different batches of resins have been prepared to have an additional independent sample set. The number of samples required for MIR and possible applications of MIR and NIR spectroscopy in this context including limitations have been discussed.