Detection of microplastics based on spatial heterodyne Raman spectroscopy

Abstract

As a new type of pollutant, microplastics have attracted extensive attention due to its characteristics such as small size and degradation difficulty under natural circumstance. Though there are many detection methods nowadays, there are still some limitations like long detection time, high false detection rate and expensive detection equipment, which make the detection of microplastics exists in natural environment hard to carry out. To improve the environmental conditions, rapid, efficient, and accurate detection methods for microplastics are needed urgently. In this paper, a method combined the Spatial heterodyne technology and Raman spectroscopy was proposed to detect the microplastics. A spatial heterodyne spectrometer (SHS) was built, and the algorithms used to process the spectrum data were introduced. An optical system used to collect the Raman signal of the sample was built and connected with the SHS. Four different kinds of microplastic samples were detected by the complete system and identification can be achieved according to the Raman spectrum. The samples were also detected by using a normal spectrometer for comparison. A comparison of Raman spectrum using conventional dispersion spectrometer was carried out and the result shows that SHS is of higher signal-to-noise ratio. The results indicate that SHRS technology has good performance and development prospects in the field of microplastics detection.