Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy: Application to material science

CHED 1572

Jagdish P. Singh, singh@icet.msstate.edu and Fang-Yu Yueh, yueh@icet.msstate.edu. Institute for Clean Energy Technology, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS 39759
Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is an ideal technique for the in-situ monitoring of the composition of glass batch before it enters the glass melting furnace, saving significant amount of energy by the optimization of the furnace parameters for a particular composition of the glass batch. The present study investigates this application of LIBS by determining the elemental composition of the glass batch used (i) as surrogate for radioactive glass waste and (ii) to manufacture the most common type of flat glass. The analytical figure of merit of the glass batch data obtained from the two different detection systems namely (A) Czerny-Turner spectrometer with diode array detector, and (B) Echelle spectrometer fitted with ICCD camera, are compared. In this paper we will also present a fiber-optic laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (FO LIBS) probe which is suitable for the measurement of the concentration of minor elements of the molten Al alloy in a laboratory furnace.