Fast fingerprinting of arson accelerants by proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry

Current techniques for the forensic analysis of fire debris as a means to detect the presence of arson accelerants normally use off-line sampling with the collection of accelerant vapours on activated charcoal strips and further pre-chemistry prior to analysis. An alternative method for the direct detection of arson accelerants that requires no sample pre-treatment is described here. The analysis uses proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS), incorporating a time-of-flight mass spectrometer for rapid multichannel compound detection. It is demonstrated that using PTR-MS volatile organic compound (VOC) fingerprints of a given fire accelerant can be collected by simple head space analysis of accelerant burned materials. Using a set of the four most common arson accelerants and four common household building materials, characteristic VOC fingerprints are shown to provide successful identification of the accelerant used to burn each material. There is the potential to develop this methodology for the rapid screening of large numbers of samples.