The purpose of this research is to introduce a method for the forensic elemental analysis of cotton fibers for the purpose of increasing the discrimination between otherwise similar cotton evidence using microwave digestion Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) and Laser Ablation- Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). A quadrupole ICP-MS and UV laser ablation (266nm) instruments were used for the analysis. A cotton standard reference material (IAEA V-9) was used to validate the developed methods producing good accuracy with typically 10 % bias and good precision (typically 5% RSD) for the element list: 25Mg, 27Al, 55Mn, 57Fe, 88Sr and 137Ba. It was found that the LA-ICP-MS method resulted in improved precision over the solution ICP-MS method. Twenty four (24) raw cotton samples and five white cotton T-Shirts were analyzed with the developed methods. It was also found that all the raw cotton samples from different sources were distinguishable from each other, as were all the cotton T-shirts resulting in zero type I errors and zero type II errors for the pairwise comparisons.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fiu.edu/oai:digitalcommons.fiu.edu:etd-4678 |
| Date | 27 March 2009 |
| Creators | Gallo, Jenny M. |
| Publisher | FIU Digital Commons |
| Source Sets | Florida International University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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