Identification of microplastics using Raman spectroscopy: Latest developments and future prospects.

By C. Araújo, M. Nolasco, A. M. Ribeiro, P. Ribeiro-Claro. Water Research, 2018

780 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Widespread microplastic pollution is raising growing concerns as to its detrimental effects upon living organisms. A realistic risk assessment must stand on representative data on the abundance, size distribution and chemical composition of microplastics. Raman microscopy is an indispensable tool for the analysis of very small microplastics (<20 μm). Still, its use is far from widespread, in part due to drawbacks such as long measurement time and proneness to spectral distortion induced by fluorescence. This review discusses each drawback followed by a showcase of interesting and easily available solutions that contribute to faster and better identification of microplastics using Raman spectroscopy. Among discussed topics are: enhanced signal quality with better detectors and spectrum processing; automated particle selection for faster Raman mapping; comprehensive reference libraries for successful spectral matching. A last section introduces non-conventional Raman techniques (non-linear Raman, hyperspectral imaging, standoff Raman) which permit more advanced applications such as real-time Raman detection and imaging of microplastics.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4a54636933700a1601a57d0a7741ac63bb07e58

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. N. Posth

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. A. Pozzi
2. G. Binda
3. Silvia Galafassi
4. Roberta Bettinetti
5. A. Bellasi
6. P. Volta

In Pollution

1. A. Pozzi
2. G. Binda
3. Silvia Galafassi
4. Roberta Bettinetti
5. A. Bellasi
6. P. Volta

Citations in the corpus

• Microplastic Contamination in Freshwater Environments: A Review, Focusing on Interactions with Sediments and Benthic Organisms (2020, background): “Moreover, FT-IR presents broader bands and lower sensitivity to non-polar functional groups compared to Raman spectroscopy [171,176].”
• Micro‐by‐micro interactions: How microorganisms influence the fate of marine microplastics (2020, methodology): “14 infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy identify functional groups in plastic, allowing 260 marine plastic debris to be identified by plastic type (Araujo et al. 2018; Hendrickson et al. 2018).”