Identification of textiles by handheld near infrared spectroscopy: Protecting customers against product counterfeiting

Abstract

Textiles are extremely important materials for everyday life with a broad range of applications and properties. Due to the large variations in quality on the one hand and the increasing quality awareness and price consciousness of customers on the other hand, the availability of a simple tool for a rapid test of the correct identity of the purchased textile article would be a significant progress in customer protection. Miniaturization of near infrared spectrometers has advanced to the point where handheld instruments could provide reliable and affordable means to serve this purpose. One objective of the present communication was to scrutinize the identification and discrimination performance for textile materials for four realhandheld (<200 g) near infrared spectrometers based on different monochromator principles. The second focus was to show that in the near future these handheld instruments can be used by a non-expert user community to protect themselves against fraud in textile purchase situations. For this purpose, diffuse reflection spectra of 72 textile samples of synthetic and natural origin were measured. While in simple situations, test samples can readily be authenticated by visual inspection of their near infrared spectra only, for a more comprehensive identification of unknown samples principal component analysis in combination with soft independent modeling of class analogies was applied. In the present work, this approach provided a suitable analytical tool for the correct assignment of the investigated different types of textile materials. Moreover, the evaluation of the mean Euclidian distances in the principal component analysis score plots derived from the near infrared spectra of the textile classes under investigation allowed to compare the identification performance and discrimination capability of the different handheld instruments.

Handheld near-infrared spectrometers: Where are we heading?

“…identification/authentication of textiles as a measure against counterfeit. 14 This gives prospects for future evolution of applications of miniaturized NIRS. However, the scientific and professional community understands that the performance evaluation of miniaturized spectrometers in different scenarios needs to remain a continuously explored direction, as new devices keep appearing on the market.…”

Breakthrough Potential in Near-Infrared Spectroscopy: Spectra Simulation. A Review of Recent Developments

“…The mentioned typical low absorptivity in NIR (Figure 1) results in the ability of examining a bulk sample in high volume with no limitation to the sample surface, as often encountered in optical spectroscopy. NIRS has found its way to quality control laboratories dealing with, e.g., food (Smyth and Cozzolino, 2013; Henn et al, 2016; Ringsted et al, 2017; Chapman et al, 2018) and natural products (Pezzei et al, 2017a), agriculture-related items (Pezzei et al, 2017b), pharmaceuticals (Kirchler et al, 2017a; Yan and Siesler, 2018a), phytopharmaceuticals (Stecher et al, 2003) and phytoanalysis in general (Huck, 2017a), polymers (Huck, 2016b; Unger et al, 2016; Yan and Siesler, 2018b) fuel (Lutz et al, 2014a), cosmetics 2 (Blanco et al, 2007), biomedical applications (Jue and Masuda, 2013), general industry (Huck, 2017b) and environmental studies (Altinpinarn et al, 2013; Roberts and Cozzolino, 2016, 2017), among others (Ciurczak and Drennen, 2002; Siesler et al, 2002; Iwamoto, 2009; Cozzolino, 2014; Huck, 2014, 2016a; Ozaki et al, 2017; Power et al, 2018; Yan and Siesler, 2018c). In response to strong demand from the industry the instrumentation has been undergoing continuous development.…”

Principles and Applications of Miniaturized Near‐Infrared (NIR) Spectrometers

“…Portable NIR spectrometers were also assessed for their performance and applicability to textile analysis [118, 119] . Rodgers et al.…”

“…Therefore, the ability to rapidly assess fiber micronaire, maturity, and fineness on‐site under ambient conditions by portable NIR spectroscopy is a major step forward in textile analysis. Yan and Siesler emphasized the potential of using handheld NIR spectrometers for textile authentication [119] . They provided evidence that miniaturized instruments performed adequately in identifying most common textile types (poly(acrylonitrile)/acrylic, wool/cashmere, cotton, elastane, Kevlar, Nomex, PA6/PA66, PET, and silk).…”