Experiences in the detection of drugs of abuse in smuggling seizures and forensic samples using electronic tongue principles

Abstract

The application of voltammetric sensors to the analysis of illicit drugs in combination with different chemometric tools to achieve their identification and quantification is explored herein. The aim is to process the whole voltammograms obtained from different sensors as a unique profile, and analyze those with the aid of pattern recognition methods that allow the extraction of a characteristic fingerprint, rather than focusing on the oxidation peaks associated to each of the drugs. To this aim, different arrays of electrodes were prepared to analyzed samples employing square wave voltammetry (SWV). Next, identification of different drugs was achieved by means of principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), while their quantification was attained by partial least squares (PLS) modelling.