| In this thesis, an application of drug analysis using surface-enhanced infrared spectroscopy (SEIRS) is presented. SEIRS can be considered as a more efficient form of IR analysis, because of the signal enhancement effect observed. Amphetamine and methamphetamine are used in this thesis as model systems to investigate and demonstrate the surface enhanced infrared spectroscopic effect.; The presence of polyelectrolytelnanoparticle films on the surface provided surface enhancements as high as 33-fold in the absorbance of infrared peaks. It was verified that the polymer does not contribute much to the surface infrared enhancement. The surface modification with Ag nanoparticles resulted in more definitive peaks in the spectra, when compared to Au nanoparticles. There was also an increase in the surface infrared enhancement with the increase in the number of bilayers; however, there was no further increase after 3 bilayers. This may have been caused by decreased surface area due to the aggregation of the nanoparticle systems. This project is the first time where nanoparticles-embedded polymer coatings are used as SEIRS-active substrate for drug analysis. However, there is a lot of research to be done in future in order to employ this technique in the actual crime cases as it currently shows only a preliminary study of the potential of this technique in trace drug analysis. |
