0000000000387701
AUTHOR
Clara Perez-alfonso
Preliminary results on direct quantitative determination of cocaine in impregnated materials by infrared spectroscopy
Abstract Partial least squares models were built for the direct determination of cocaine in seized impregnated smuggled materials. Measurements are based on the attenuated total reflectance middle infrared spectra (ATR-MIR) and diffuse reflectance spectra in the near range (DR-NIR) obtained directly from the surface of the impregnated materials. The aforementioned procedures offer fast, cheap and environmentally friendly green alternatives to the reference method based on the extraction of the drug and its quantification by gas chromatography. Additionally it has been verified that results found are statistically comparable with those obtained by the reference method with root mean square e…
Detection and characterization of emerging psychoactive substances by ion mobility spectrometry
Rapid detection and identification of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) continues to present significant analytical challenges to forensic and analytical chemists. Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) has been traditionally considered as the analytical technique of choice to detect illicit drugs in security points in airports, borderlines and customs. Databases of the reduced mobility (K0 ) values of illicit drugs are available in the scientific literature and they should be completed with data of emerging designer drugs. In this paper, we have evaluated the effect of different measurement conditions and determined the K0 values of an important number of NPS including different families; such …
A green method for the determination of cocaine in illicit samples
Abstract Direct determination of cocaine in untreated seized samples has been made based on diffuse reflectance measurements of the near infrared (NIR) radiation through samples contained inside standard glass vials. The method used a series of previously analyzed samples, by the reference gas chromatography method, to build a partial least squares calibration model which was validated using an independent set of samples. The use of a general model for samples containing from 11.38% till 86.44% (w/w) cocaine was based on the use of spectral ranges from 12500.7 to 10128.6, 9339.8 to 6967.7 and 5388.3 to 4597.6 cm−1 with previous first derivative and vector normalization data pre-processing a…
Ion mobility spectrometry evaluation of cocaine occupational exposure in forensic laboratories
An approach, based on ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) has been developed for the control of cocaine in air of the breathing zone of operators, in laboratory surfaces and in nasal mucus of employees to evaluate cocaine exposure in a forensic laboratory. The analytical methodology has been validated in terms of accuracy, precision and limits of detection and results obtained were statistically comparable with those obtained by liquid chromatography. Cocaine concentration in laboratory air increases from 100 ± 35 ng m(-3) of a normal day to 10,000 ng m(-3) during the manipulation of cocaine seizures. The occupational exposure limit (OEL) for cocaine has not been established which difficult the…