A calibration-free model for laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy using non-gated detectors

Calibration-free (CF) laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is normally only applicable for gated detectors due to its dependence on the assumption of a steady-state plasma. However, most currently available LIBS systems are equipped with non-gated detectors such as charge-coupled device (CCD), which degrades the accuracy of CF method. In this paper, the reason for the less satisfactory quantification performance of CF for LIBS with non-gated detectors was clarified and a time-integration calibration-free (TICF) model was proposed for applications with non-gated detectors. It was based on an assumed temporal profile of plasma properties, including temperature and electron density, obtained from another pre-experiment. The line intensity at different time during the signal collection time window was estimated with self-absorption correction according to the temporal profile of the plasma properties. The proposed model was validated on titanium alloys and compared with traditional CF. The accuracy of elemental concentration measurement was improved significantly: the average relative error of aluminum and vanadium decreased from 6.07% and 22.34% to 2.01% and 1.92%, respectively. The quantification results showed that TICF method was able to extend the applicability of CF to LIBS with non-gated detectors.