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Spark spectrometry of toxic smokes: towards a portable, inexpensive, and high-resolution environment monitoring instrument

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Abstract

Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy are the most popular techniques for monitoring toxic gases in the environments. Apart from sensitivity and resolution of the techniques, they suffer from several issues including portability and high cost. For design and realization of a low cost, spark spectrometry based portable instrument for monitoring toxic gases in our environments is the main motive of the present work. We have introduced several toxic smokes into a gas chamber containing our developed instrument. We have also investigated the capability of the instrument for online analysis of suspended particulate matter as well as various gaseous elements in the smokes. We have also developed software for the practical interface. The apparatus has been successfully tested to monitor several toxic fumes including cigarette smoke and NO x . It has also been demonstrated that the instrument is equally efficient to monitor air quality in the open environment, for example, presence of nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor in the ambient condition. In the present work, we have demonstrated some important spectroscopic studies including role of water vapor (solvation) in the ionization of potassium, which is an active ingredient of toxic smokes, in the ionization which leading to the generation of atomic emission under the spark spectrometer can also be achieved with our instrument. The sensitivity of the instrument is found to be sub ppm (0.27 ± 0.13 ppm) in the case of cigarette smoke in ambient condition. The simplicity and extremely cost-effective design can provide an alternative method of detection of fumes in air and can serve as a cheap alternative for costly/bulky bench-top instruments.

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Acknowledgments

S. S. acknowledges DST, Govt. of India, for its financial support through IRHPA Project “Study of Cosmic Ray aerosol cloud connection in the context of regional Climate change” at Bose Institute, Darjeeling. We thank Prof. Sibaji Raha, Director, Bose Institute and Prof. Sanjay Kr. Ghosh, Bose Institute for their valuable inputs and their constant support throughout this work. N.P thanks DST, India for Inspire Research Fellowship. We thank DST, India for financial grants (DST/TM/SERI/2k11/103 & SB/S1/PC-011/2013).

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  1. Department of Chemical, Biological and Macromolecular Sciences, S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Block JD, Sector III, Salt Lake City, Kolkata, 700 098, India

    Soumendra Singh, Nabarun Polley & Samir Kumar Pal

  2. Centre for Astroparticle Physics and Space Science, Bose Institute, Salt Lake Campus, Block - EN, Sector – V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata, 700091, India

    Soumendra Singh & Amitabha Mitra

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  1. Soumendra Singh
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Correspondence to Samir Kumar Pal.

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Singh, S., Polley, N., Mitra, A. et al. Spark spectrometry of toxic smokes: towards a portable, inexpensive, and high-resolution environment monitoring instrument. Clean Techn Environ Policy 16, 1703–1712 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-014-0749-0

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