Analyzing silver concentration in soil using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Abstract

Determination of concentration of heavy metal ions in soil, such as silver, is very important to study soil pollution levels. Several techniques have been developed to determine silver ion concentration in soil. In this paper, we utilized laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to study silver concentration in soil. We used four different data analysis methods to calculate silver concentration. In this case, we prepared soil samples with different silver ion concentrations from 400 ppm to 1000 ppm. Our analysis was focused on the 843.15 nm silver atomic absorption line. We found that plasma intensity increased as silver concentration increased. Our findings were based on our analysis using four different analysis methods. We believe that these analysis methods are able to calculate silver concentration in soil using LIBS.