Method for predicting lignocellulose components in jute by transformed FT-NIR spectroscopic data and chemometrics

Abstract In this investigation, a nondestructive technique has been developed for determining chemical composition of jute fiber by chemometric modeling with pretreated FT-NIR spectroscopic data. The chemical composition of jute fibers in wet chemical method were, 58 to 61.80 % α-cellulose, 13.0 to 21.90 % lignin, 9.89 to 16.8 % pentosan and 79.02 to 88.33 % holocellulose. FT-NIR spectral data from range 9000–4000 cm⁻¹ of all jute samples were collected from the instrument. Spectral data of jute samples were pretreated with second order derivatives (SOD), standard normal variate (SNV) techniques and both together were used before calibration. Two chemometric calibration techniques: partial least square regression (PLSR) and artificial neural network (ANN) were assessed for predicting chemical compositions of Jute fibers. Result shows that prediction efficiency ({\text{R}²}) of ANN varies from 72–99 % for calibration, validation and test datasets. However, by PLSR, {\text{R}²} are much higher and consistent than those by earlier one. For α-cellulose, lignin, pentosan and holocellulose {\text{R}²} values hover around 95–99 %. Thereby, a non-destructive, simple and cost effective novel method is being proposed to determine chemical compositions of jute with pretreated FT-NIR spectral data and chemometric calibration techniques.