A multivariate model based on dominant factor for laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy measurements

This paper presents a new approach of applying partial least squares (PLS) method combined with a physical principle based on dominant factor. The characteristic line intensity of the specific element was taken to build up the dominant factor to reflect the major elemental concentration and PLS approach was then applied to further improve the model accuracy. The deviation evolution of characteristic line intensity from the ideal condition was depicted and according to the deviation understanding, efforts were taken to model the non-linear self-absorption and inter-element interference effects to improve the accuracy of dominant factor model. With a dominant factor to carry the main quantitative information, the novel multivariate model combines advantages of both the conventional univariate and PLS models and partially avoids the overuse of the unrelated noise in the spectrum for PLS application. The dominant factor makes the combination model more robust over a wide concentration range and PLS application improves the model accuracy for samples with matrices within the calibration sample set. Results show that RMSEP of the final dominant factor based PLS model decreased to 2.33% from 5.25% when using the conventional PLS approach with full spectral information. Furthermore, with the development in understanding the physics of the laser-induced plasma, there is potential to easily improve the accuracy of the dominant factor model as well as the proposed novel multivariate model.