Advanced Techniques for Oil Contamination Detection in Metals

In recent years, detecting contamination in materials has generally become increasingly important across various industries. The ability to swiftly and accurately identify contaminants is crucial, making advanced detection methods like Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) invaluable.

Recently, we were also tasked with assessing oil contamination for a customer. To address this customer’s specific need for precise information about oil contamination levels on their metal samples, we utilized our M-Trace system for measurements. For this particular study, the customer provided us with four metal samples, each featuring two distinct compositions: one set of clean samples and another set deliberately contaminated. This arrangement allowed us to comprehensively assess the effectiveness of LIBS in detecting oil residues across various materials and conditions. Over the course of this specific analysis, we collected a total of 500 spectra, acquiring 125 spectra per sample per minute.

To detect oil contamination, carbon served as our primary marker due to its reliable presence in such cases. Our findings confirmed the anticipated presence of carbon in both  contaminated samples, underscoring LIBS’s efficacy in pinpointing surface-level oil contaminants as well as determining the distribution of oil contamination on the sample. 

Presence of C in clean (red line) and contaminated sample (black line)

Beyond mere detection, LIBS also enabled us to measure depth profiling and analyze the level of oil contamination at different depths of a sample. This approach revealed that the highest concentrations of oil residues were indeed concentrated near the surface layers of the contaminated samples and progressively diminished with the increasing depth.

The application of LIBS using the Sci-Trace system provided fast and accurate detection of oil contamination. With just a single measurement, we were able to gather comprehensive contamination data, demonstrating LIBS’s efficiency in surface and depth profile analysis. This method’s rapid acquisition rate and precision make it an invaluable tool for industries needing to monitor and control contamination levels.

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