Synchrotron-based fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and statistic analysis in detection of post-blast traces of explosive materials

Abstract

International terrorism is one of the most serious security threats that societies face today. This highlights the need for fast and accurate investigation techniques for evaluating vital clues left behind by the terrorists' bomb blasts. Synchrotron-based Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectroscopy is the method of choice in many applications because of its extremely high sensitivity and selectivity in detection of analyzed samples. Spectroscopic measurements have the capacity to provide a lot of data in a short time, giving the description of the analyzed samples. One example of the application of this technique is the analysis of the remnants after the high explosive materials blasts. The amount of obtained information due to complexity of the measured spectra forces the use of additional data processing. The aim of analyzing data is often to find the underlying structure of a system, and to describe it in the simplest possible way. The use of multivariate statistical analysis enables reduction of the obtained data to the important factors and removes all redundant information. Our work shows that synchrotron-based FTIR spectroscopy in combination with chemometric methods in comparison with conventional practice has several advantages: it has the potential for fully automatic measurement and analysis and it could be much quicker and cheaper for large scale screening procedures. © 2012 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.