Based on a recently developed chemometric method, heuristic evolving latent projections (HELP), a new procedure for the analysis of two dimensional HPLC-DAD data is proposed in this paper. The method has been successfully applied for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in environmental samples. For overlapping peaks, which are difficult to quantify in one dimensional chromatography, complete resolution with an unique resolution in chemical sense can be obtained with HELP method, making full use of selective information in both spectral and chromatographic directions. With resoluton results at hand, three possible methods can then be used for peak quantification. The proposed method greatly lessens the demand on chomatographic separation, and can be directly used for the identification and quantitative measurement of complex samples.

Key words: ENVIRONMEATAL ANALYSIS, POLYNUCLEAR ATOMATIC HYDROCARBON P