Scattered light: improving photoacoustic spectral measurement with a drug tablet

Abstract

Photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) is a powerful tool for the study of the absorption spectra of solid samples. Scattered light, which used to be a main error source in conventional absorption spectroscopy, is not a problem for PAS, and furthermore, in this paper it is helpful for photoacoustic spectroscopy measurement. In this work, the photoacoustic spectra of an olanzapine tablet and its powder have been investigated. Differential analysis was used to eliminate the background signal generated by the photoacoustic cell. It is found that the photoacoustic spectrum of olanzapine in the powdered olanzapine tablet has the same spectral features as that of the pure olanzapine powder, while the photoacoustic spectrum of the olanzapine tablet does not have, although the ingredients in both are completely the same. This phenomenon can be interpreted as the light scattering effects in the powdered olanzapine tablet. The light scattering effects in a solid mixture amplify the photoacoustic spectral features of the main light-absorbing ingredient in the mixture, rather than enhance the measured photoacoustic signal over the whole measured wavelength range, which is different from the influence of light scattering effects on a single-ingredient solid powder. Based on this work, a method is proposed to preliminarily fast identify the light-absorbing ingredient in a solid mixture. Using the method, a drug tablet can be measured directly in solid state and hardly need sample preprocessing, and thus the time for composition analyses will be reduced significantly.