Abstract
This study covers an extensive experimental design that was developed for creating simulated fire debris samples under controlled conditions for the detection and identification of ignitable liquids (IL) residues. This design included 19 different substrates, 45 substrate combinations with and without ignitable liquids, and 45 different ILs from three classes (i.e., white spirit, gasoline, and lamp oil). Chemical analysis was performed with comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC×GC-TOFMS) for improved separation and compound identification. The enhanced peak capacity offered by GC×GC-TOFMS allowed the use of a target compound list in combination with a simple binary decision model to arrive at quite acceptable results with respect to IL detection (89% true positive and 7% false positive rate) and classification (100% correct white spirit, 79% correct gasoline, and 77% correct lamp oil assignment). Although these results were obtained in a limited set of laboratory controlled fire experiments including only three IL classes, this study confirms the conclusions of other studies that GC×GC-TOFMS can be a powerful tool in the challenging task of forensic fire debris analysis.
Highlights
Fire debris analysis is performed for the identification and/or classification of ignitable liquid residues (ILRs) in samples taken from a post fire incident scene
Chemical analysis was performed with comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC×GC-TOFMS) for enhanced separation and compound identification
The obtained GC×GC-TOFMS dataset was used in previous studies wherein chemometric techniques for data reduction and feature selection were applied for the detection and classification of ILRs in fire debris samples [22,26]
Summary
Fire debris analysis is performed for the identification and/or classification of ignitable liquid residues (ILRs) in samples taken from a post fire incident scene. A large series of controlled laboratory-scale fire debris samples were prepared for the detection and identification of ILRs. Chemical analysis was performed with comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC×GC-TOFMS) for enhanced separation and compound identification. The obtained GC×GC-TOFMS dataset was used in previous studies wherein chemometric techniques for data reduction and feature selection were applied for the detection and classification of ILRs in fire debris samples [22,26] To our knowledge this is the first study combining lab scale fire experiments under realistic conditions with the comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatographic (GC×GC and GC×GC-TOFMS) analysis on the resulting fire debris samples using a simple chemistry based approach to deal with complex GC×GC data
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