Multi-constituents detection in contaminated aerosol clouds using remote-filament-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Remote-filament-induced breakdown spectroscopy (R-FIBS) was used for probing a cloud of aqueous aerosols containing a mixture of PbCl2, CuCl2, FeCl2 and NaCl. We demonstrated experimentally that it can be used as a sensitive sensing technique to remotely retrieve the composition of microdroplets in clouds located at a distance. In fact, fluorescence from all the metallic ions dissolved was observed. Moreover, these spectrally narrow atomic transitions excited by the low-density plasma did not show any signal overlap. These characteristic spectra demonstrate that R-FIBS can be used to simultaneously recognize and distinguish every single metallic constituent dissolved inside such a cloud.