The article presents the results of studies of infrared absorption spectra of saturated vapors of alcohols and alcohol-containing mixtures in the range of 1.3—1.5 μm. A method was developed for the quantitative determination of the composition of water-alcohol mixtures based on the use of multiple linear regression,
and a range of methanol concentrations was determined, in which the nonlinearity of the dependence of the concentration of alcohols in saturated vapors over a liquid mixture on the concentration of alcohols in this liquid mixture does not significantly affect the results of analysis of the mixture composition. A method for optimizing a set of wavelengths for multiple linear regression, based on minimizing the mean-square error in determining the concentration is proposed and implemented. The developed methods make it possible to determine the presence of small (<1%) amounts of methanol against the background of large amounts of ethanol and water using relatively inexpensive and accessible spectroscopic equipment.
