The thermal decomposition of sewage sludge has been investigated using coupled TG-FTIR for long time experiment (10 h). The exploitation of the resulted data from FTIR is performed by the SIMPLe-to-use interactive self-modelling mixture analysis (SIMPLISMA) method and allows to identify some of the evolved gases and to obtain their relative concentration profiles versus time without prior knowledge of constituents. As shown, this method can work properly for mixture with overlapped bands but some compounds remain "invisible" to FTIR analysis. More of that for long time experiment, it is possible to extract a spectrometer baseline contribution, which contributes to minimise noise and time variation. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.