Initial results of LIBS analysis of explosives contamination in soils

TORO, CINTHYA; JUAN VOROBIOFF; EVANGELINA MARTORELLA; BOGGIO ,NORBERTO GABRIEL; ANDREA PEREYRA ; CARLOS A. RINALDI

Buenos Aires (On Line meeting) , Madrid , Bari , Paris , etc ,etc.

Encuentro; 1st. International OnLine Meeting On LIBS; 2020

CNEA , UNSAM , U.Complutense de Madrid , U. de Lyon , UNAM (México) , U. de Zaragoza, U. de Bari (Italia) ,

The LIBS technique has been used to characterize different types of soils that is suitable for the qualitative analysis of heavy metals in solid samples, including environmental ones . The choice of this method to analyze soils in general, and contaminated in particular, is mainly due to the benefits presented, such as: no sample preparation, remote detection, very short measurement time, sensitivity of analysis analysis in ppm , the elements of high and low atomic number can be detected simultaneously. On the other hand, explosives are often associated with armed conflicts, and do not usually talk about the long-term effects of these toxic compounds on the environment due to their manufacturing and disposal process, both for the armed forces and security and for its use in mining. The explosives present in the soils are toxic compounds; TNT and RDX are classified by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a possible Carcinogen (for humans) and toxic to all tested organisms and difficult degradation in the environment. In certain contexts in which the subject is brought to public knowledge, they exist not only for monitoring but also for specific remediation solutions in several countries, such as the US, and the European community or in Argentina (Demilitarization Plan currently carried out by CITEDEF). Explosives are generally rich in nitro molecules and present remarkably similar spectral profiles with emission lines between which nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are used. In these cases, advanced chemometric analysis can be used for explosive discrimination. The application and combination of multivariate chemometric methods to LIBS data sets has allowed the extraction of information and has been used successfully to identify them in metal matrices . Our experience in LIBS and explosives invites us to study this type of contamination. In this work will be presented the first results of measurements with LIBS of TNT, RDX, PENT in metal matrices and in soils with the objective of finding soil quality indicators. Also, the application of computational intelligence for its identification.