Elemental analysis of cotton fiber evidence for use in the field of forensic science

Authors

Jenny M. Gallo, Florida International University

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Major/Program

Forensic Science

First Advisor's Name

Jose Almirall

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Yong Cai

Third Advisor's Name

Kenneth Furton

Date of Defense

3-27-2009

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to introduce a method for the forensic elemental analysis of cotton fibers for the purpose of increasing the discrimination between otherwise similar cotton evidence using microwave digestion Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) and Laser Ablation- Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). A quadrupole ICP-MS and UV laser ablation (266nm) instruments were used for the analysis. A cotton standard reference material (IAEA V-9) was used to validate the developed methods producing good accuracy with typically 10 % bias and good precision (typically 5% RSD) for the element list: ²⁵Mg, ²⁷Al, ⁵⁵Mn, ⁵⁷Fe, ⁸⁸Sr and ¹³⁷Ba. It was found that the LA-ICP-MS method resulted in improved precision over the solution ICP-MS method. Twenty four (24) raw cotton samples and five white cotton T-Shirts were analyzed with the developed methods. It was also found that all the raw cotton samples from different sources were distinguishable from each other, as were all the cotton T-shirts resulting in zero type I errors and zero type II errors for the pairwise comparisons.

Identifier

FI15101480

Recommended Citation

Gallo, Jenny M., "Elemental analysis of cotton fiber evidence for use in the field of forensic science" (2009). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3440.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3440