| Professionals in the fields of forensics, pollution remediation, and agriculture frequently analyze soils. Several aspects of soil are of interest, including the inorganic and organic content. The former is typically analyzed by elemental methods (AA or ICP). The “total organic” content is measured in most cases by mass loss upon pyrolysis. Essentially, the soil is weighed, heated in air to a high temperature, and reweighed upon cooling. The weight loss is (assumed to be) due to loss of organic content. This method alone does not identify the organic material, it only gives a value for the total organic content.
Recent work has described an FT-IR forensic analysis of soil. The basic method involves subtracting transmission spectra before and after pyrolysis. The “missing peaks” represent organic material removed during heating. The method is simple to implement, and gives far more information than mass loss alone. However, there is also an opportunity to acquire information about the organics by analyzing the off-gassing material during the heating step. |
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