Publications by Author: Raymond G. Belliveau

Thermal imaging is not ordinarily a good way to visualize chemical contrast. In recent work, however, we observed strong and reproducible images with chemical contrasts on blood-stained fabrics, especially on more hydrophobic fabrics like acrylic and polyester.

Infrared spectroscopy is an appealing technique for application to forensic samples because it offers the benefits of being non-destructive and non-hazardous, fast, reasonably sensitive, and resistant to some of the interferences of many commonly used techniques. Our research team has been focusing on detecting biological fluids on fabrics, which are inherently anisotropic substrates for spectroscopy. The work presented here investigates the effect of azimuthal angle of the sample on the infrared diffuse reflection spectra of fabrics with a goal of removing sampling differences as a source of analytic variation.

The effectiveness of material to emit energy as thermal radiation is important in determining the apparent temperature in infrared thermographic measurements. For this reason, a number of measurements of the thermal emissivity in the mid-infrared thermographic (8–12 µm) region have been reported for fabrics. However, many fabrics adsorb moisture from the air, and condensed water has a relatively high thermal emissivity. In this manuscript, we report measurements of adsorption isotherms and mid-infrared thermal emissivity for nylon, cotton, polyester, and acrylic as a function of their moisture content in weight percent at temperatures just above ambient. We find that the order of water mass percentage gain for the fabrics in high humidity conditions are polyester < acrylic < nylon < cotton. The thermal emissivity is ∼0.88 independent of moisture content for the fabrics polyester, cotton, and nylon, while acrylic shows a pronounced increase in thermal emissivity as moisture content increases, ranging from ɛ ∼ 0.81 at low humidity conditions to ɛ ∼ 0.88 under high humidity conditions. In this work, emissivity measurements are made by imaging through a novel infrared window made from household cling wrap and interpreted with equations that are independent of window transmittance and sample temperature.

The emissivity of nylon, cotton, polyester and acrylic fabrics coated with dried rat blood have been determined in the thermographic infrared region (~8–12 µm wavelength) at 40 °C and at the lowest humidity we could attain in the laboratory. Results show the emissivity of known nylon (ε = 0.87), cotton (ε = 0.88) and polyester (ε = 0.88) fabrics in our laboratory increase by 0.01, 0.01 and 0.03 respectively when coated with dried blood at a concentration of 100 µL of whole blood per 0.9 cm2 of fabric. An acrylic fabric (ε = 0.82) shows an increase in emissivity of 0.05 under the same conditions. We also investigated the change in emissivity of an acrylic fabric sample coated heavily with whole rat blood 8 years previously as a function of humidity and report that its emissivity increases from 0.90 at low humidity to nearly 0.94 at 90% humidity.