Chemical characterization of glass samples by INAA using Dhruva research reactor for forensic study

Glass, ceramics, food and biological samples are important in forensic studies, in which their composition and provenance/origin are studied by suitable analytical techniques. Among these, glass samples (broken pieces) used as wind shields of vehicles (cars) are often studied in the cases accidents, in order to ascertain the suspected vehicle. The car wind shield glasses are mostly soda-lime glasses having major composition as oxides of Si, Na and Ca along with oxides of Al, K and Mg. The method of preparation and major elemental concentrations might be same for various soda-lime glasses obtained from various sources and used in many brands of cars and thus it is not easy to distinguish them through the information of major elemental concentrations. It is known that trace elements like transition elements as well as rare earth element (REEs) present in glass and ceramics are source specific and thus their elemental concentration information are very important in provenance studies vis a vis in forensic studies. Thus, it is important to choose a suitable technique which can give information on major, minor and trace elements simultaneously. Wet-chemical/spectroscopic techniques are destructive, thus are not suitable. Among the nuclear/radioanalytical techniques like XRF, IBA (PIXE, PIGE) and NAA, Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) using reactor neutrons is suitable for trace elements of interest along with major and minor elements with adequate precision and accuracy. In the present study, we have analyzed five different soda-lime glass samples by relative method of INAA