Katja Šnuderl,^a Marjana Simonič,^a Jan Mocak,^b*Darinka Brodnjak-Vončina^a

^aUniversity of Maribor, Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Smetanova 17, SI-2000 Maribor, Slovenia
^bUniversity of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Nam. J. Herdu 2, SK-91701 Trnava, Slovakia.
E-mail: jan.mocak@ucm.sk.

Paper based on a presentation at the 12^th International Symposium on Separation Sciences, Lipica, Slovenia,
September 27–29, 2006.

Abstract
Fifty samples of natural mineral waters from springs in Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Czech Republic and further countries of former Yugoslavia have been analysed. The mass concentration of cations (Na⁺, K⁺, Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, Fe²⁺, Mn²⁺, NH⁴⁺) and anions (F^–, Cl^–, I^–, NO^3–, SO₄ ^2–, HCO^3–), the spring temperature, pH, conductivity and carbon dioxide mass concentration have been measured using standard analytical methods. Appropriate statistical methods and different chemometric tools were used to evaluate the obtained data, namely, (i) descriptive statistics, (ii) principal component analysis (PCA), (iii) cluster analysis, and (iv) linear discriminant analysis (LDA). It was confirmed that Slovenian natural mineral water samples differ most from the German ones but are relatively similar to the Czech and Hungarian ones. Water samples from Hungary are similar to waters from the eastern part of Slovenia.

Keywords: Natural mineral water, ion determination, principal component analysis, cluster analysis, linear discriminant analysis.