A Rapid and Sensitive Quantitative Analysis Method for TNT using Raman Spectroscopy

Raman spectroscopy as a rapid and sensitive qualitative detection method has been applied in many fields; however, it is rarely used for the quantitative purpose due to poor reproducibility of peak area. Here, 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) and its two byproducts, 2,4-dinitrotoluence (DNT) and 2,6-DNT, were firstly qualitatively analyzed by Raman spectroscopy and the characteristic parameters were extracted. Then, in the range of 2 %–9 % and 10 %–90 %, the standard curves were established between the area ratio of the characteristic peaks and the content of 2,4-DNT or 2,6-DNT using silver nanoflowers as the enhancing substrate. The fitting correlation for TNT/2,4-DNT or TNT/2,6-DNT system is around 0.99. The peak area ratio of the components exhibits much better dada reproducibility than peak area, and the relative error does not exceed 9.3 % for at least six groups of parallel experiments.