A long-short double pulse laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (long-short DP-LIBS) method was employed to improve the analytical performance of LIBS for the measurement of manganese in steel samples. The long pulse with a duration of 60 μs was generated using a neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd:YAG) laser which was operated at free-running (FR) mode. To investigate the detection ability without sample preparation, the steel washers were tested using single-pulse LIBS (SP-LIBS) and long-short DP-LIBS, respectively. The measurement results show that long-short DP-LIBS was able to record clear spectra from the steel washers with a surface layer. Through the observation on the laser craters with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), the results suggest that the improvement in detection ability can be attributed to the pre-irradiation effect of long-pulse laser beam. Next, the analytical performance for quantitative measurement of manganese was evaluated employing ten standard steel samples. The results show that the linearity fit (R2) of the calibration curve is 0.988 for long-short DP-LIBS, whereas, R2 is only 0.810 for SP-LIBS under the same measurement conditions. The repeated measurement results show that the average relative standard deviation (RSD) of the tested samples is 29.3% for SP-LIBS and is 10.5% for long-short DP-LIBS. The prediction results also show that the average relative error of prediction (REP) is 94.9% for SP-LIBS and is 4.9% for long-short DP-LIBS.
Keywords: DP-LIBS; Long–short double-pulse laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy; improvement; manganese; steel.