Sensitive analysis of carbon, chromium and silicon in steel using picosecond laser induced low pressure helium plasma

An experimental study has been performed on the gas pressure and laser energy dependent variations of plasma emission intensities in Ar, He and N-2 ambient gases induced by picosecond (ps) Nd-YAG laser irradiation on low alloy steel (JSS) samples. The study is aimed to demonstrate distinct advantage of using low pressure He ambient gas in combination with ps laser for the sensitive ppm level detection of C, Si and Cr emission lines in the UV-VIS spectral region. The much shorter pulses of ps laser are chosen for the effective ablation at much lower energy and for the benefit of reducing the undesirable long heating of the sample surface. It is found that the C I 247.8 nm, Fe I 253.5 nm, and Si I 251.4 nm emission lines induced by the ps laser at 15 mJ are readily detected with He ambient gas of 2.6 kPA, featuring generally sharp spectral signals with very low background. The following experimental results using samples with various concentrations of C, Si and Cr impurities are shown to produce for each of those elements a linear calibration line with extrapolated zero intercept, demonstrating the applicability for their quantitative analyses, with a preliminary estimated detection limits of 20 mu g/g, 15 mu g/g, and 5 mu g/g, for C, Si, and Cr, respectively. The possibility of applying the same setup for concentration depth profiling is also demonstrated. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.