Elemental Analysis of Glass and Paint Materials by Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) Forensic Application

The overall goal of this project is to develop, optimize, and validate LA-ICP-MS for the examination of glass and paint evidence. The initial phase of the project focused on: optimization of the assay parameters for glass analysis, determination of the discriminatory power in glass analysis and comparisons, application of statistical protocols to LA-ICP-MS in glass analysis, determination of the best elemental menu for paint analysis, and determination of detection limits for the elemental menu of paint samples. The goal of this award is to further optimize LA-ICP-MS for paint analysis, to examine the discriminatory power of LA-ICP-MS as compared to other techniques, and to develop a strategy to analyze paint smears and determine if environmental effects on paint can be used to distinguish among paint samples from the same source. A workshop is also planned to facilitate the transfer of this technology to practicing forensic scientists.

nca/ncf