LIBS experimental study of eliminating the interference of Al element in soil base based on background subtraction method

The pollution of heavy metals in the soil has seriously affected agriculture and food safety. Therefore, efficient and accurate detection of heavy metal pollution is a problem that needs to be solved urgently. When using laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to quantitatively analyze the Ni element in the soil, it was found that the characteristic peak of the Ni element with a wavelength of 373.68 nm in the soil would be affected by the spectral line of the Al element at 373.39 nm. Therefore, the spectra of pure aluminum-based soil and tableted soil were compared and measured. A method of using pure aluminum as the substrate and subtracting the spectral line of the Al element in the soil background to eliminate the interference of the Al element in the soil background to the Ni element was proposed. This method was called the background subtraction method. The experiment determined that the optimal delay time for both soil samples was 1.0 μs, and the lens-to-sample distance (LTSD) was 97 mm and 96 mm, respectively. The internal standard method was used to quantitatively analyze Ni in the two soil samples. The calibration curve fitting effect of the Ni element in the pure aluminum-based soil samples was good, the correlation coefficient R² was 0.997, and the maximum standard deviation (RSD) was 4.34%. The relative error of the Ni element in the soil sample after the base background subtraction method was reduced to 4%. The experimental results show that: when using LIBS technology to measure the content of heavy metal elements in the soil, under the condition that the characteristic line of the element is limited, in order to avoid the interference of the line and improve the detection accuracy, the background subtraction method can effectively eliminate the line between the elements Interference.