Year
2011
Abstract
Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) has been under development here at Los Alamos National Laboratory and laboratories in the nation and worldwide for over 40 years to address a number of analysis problems involving gases, liquids, and solids. The focus of our development effort has been the design, construction, and performance testing of LIBS instrumentation to address the needs of the international safeguards community for rapid fixed lab or in field measurements on samples of interest. In this paper we will highlight our development efforts on a backpack LIBS system that can be used to rapidly analyze surfaces contaminated with depleted uranium, metals, alloys, and samples in general that are important in the processing and reprocessing of special nuclear materials. We will also discuss an automatic sample identification feature that we have integrated into this system and are currently testing. Finally, we will discuss our recent results using a medium resolution LIBS system (res. approximately 20,000) to analyze mixed oxide samples of uranium and thorium in a stearic acid binder and some preliminary results on analyzing a similar uranium / thorium sample in the presence of a stainless steel matrix.