Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy compared with conventional plasma optical emission techniques for the analysis of metals – A review of applications and analytical performance

Abstract This review is focused on a comparison of LIBS with the two most common plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) techniques for analysis of metals; spark OES and glow discharge (GD) OES. It is shown that these two techniques have only minor differences in analytical performance. An important part of the paper reviews a direct comparison of the analytical figures of merit for bulk analysis of steels using spark and LIBS sources. The comparison was carried out using one instrument with interchangeable sources, eliminating differences related to the optical system and detectors. It was found that the spark provides slightly better analytical figures of merit. The spark analysis is considerably faster, the simple design of the spark stand has enabled complete automation, both properties of great importance in the metallurgical industry for routine analysis. The analysis of non-metallic inclusions (NMI) with spark and LIBS is presented, in the case of the spark this has become known as Pulse Distribution Analysis (PDA). A very significant difference between the techniques is that the electrical spark typically evaporates ~ 100 times more material than a single laser pulse, resulting in complete evaporation of an NMI present in the evaporated metal. The major advantage of LIBS is that it is localised with very good lateral resolution. The major advantages of spark is that it is much faster (can be done simultaneous with the bulk analysis) and easier to quantify. Compositional Depth Profiling (CDP) is compared for GD-OES and LIBS. It is shown that for applications where GD-OES is well suited, e.g. coated metallic sheet, GD-OES still performs slightly better than LIBS. Similar to the case of NMI analysis, the major advantage of LIBS is the great lateral resolution. This allows elemental surface mapping, as well as CDP of very small areas on μm scale. One further advantage of LIBS is that samples of almost any material, shape and size can be analysed, whereas GD-OES has only limited capabilities for non-flat and small samples. A general conclusion of this review is that LIBS is not likely to replace spark and GD-OES in the foreseeable future, for applications where these techniques are well suited. On the other hand several new applications, particularly in the field of on-line monitoring of industrial processes, are making great inroads for LIBS in the metallurgical and manufacturing industries.