Spring Street Abandoned Factory Dirt

Brendan Waffle and Tristen Protzmann traveled to an abandoned factory on Spring Street in Loudonville, New York to take a dirt sample to research. The SEM and the XRF (HD-Prime) was used to perform an analysis of the dirt sample. SEM stands for Scanning Electron Microscope, and XRF stands for X-Ray Fluorescent. Below are pictures of us entering the facility, leaving the facility, and a video in between.

Below is our raw image of the dirt sample taken by the SEM.



We proceeded to perform an elemental analysis of this image. The elemental map can be seen below with the raw image behind it. Definitely one of our best mappings because we can distinguish the different elements based on specific locations.


This image below is without our original image behind the elemental analysis and you can see how the mapping matches the original picture quite well. To the top left there is an irregular black area, which is due to a larger piece of dirt blocking that particular area. The piece of dirt is almost like casting a shadow over that area, that is preventing the electrons from hitting it and returning to the detector. So an elemental analysis could not be performed on that particular section of our image. If you compare the image below to the raw image you can see that there is a piece of the sample in the image, but when we do elemental mapping, no elements show up. This was interesting and puzzling at the same time.



The spectrum shown below was used to eliminate Zinc and Phosphorus. These elements did not have sufficient peaks to be included in our data. Carbon and Oxygen were also removed because of the adhesive Carbon tape that we used. The unlabeled large peaks are from the elimination of Carbon and Oxygen.



Below is our quantified data for our factory sample displayed on an Excel Sheet. As you can see the dirt was composed primarily of 5 elements (largest percentage to smallest), Calcium, Silicon, Iron, Aluminium, and Magnesium. There was barely any Manganese and Sodium. There was a miniscule amount of Nickel, Indium, and Chromium. Not really any surprising or toxic elements in our factory dirt sample, which was kind of disappointing. Indium can be mildly toxic when inhaled, but for the most part is not that toxic.



The next step in our dirt analysis was using the XRF to perform an elemental analysis. The XRF works by shooting a beam of x-rays at our sample, very similar to how the SEM works (SEM shoots electrons), but better at determining elemental composition. Looking at the full results table, we can conclude that Iron was the primary element in our sample because Iron had the most counts with 1367337.9 counts. Nickel makes up a lot of our sample as well with 62869.7 counts. The next most prominent element is Chromium, at 42697.5 counts. Certain types of Chromium are toxic and some of the other elements are toxic in this sample as well, like, Arsenic (As), Antimony (Sb), and Lead (Pb). It is interesting that we found small amounts of gold in our example, with 108 counts, which is a very small amount compared to the other elements. Therefore, you can see the differences in elemental analysis between the SEM and XRF. The XRF is better at determining toxic elements and trace elements.

Going to the factory and getting the sample was pretty interesting. We did not encounter many problems with this sample. The biggest problem was drying out the dirt enough in the oven to keep it from charging with electrons. Another problem was understanding the differences in elemental analysis between the SEM and XRF. The two instruments gave us different data to interpret which doesn't set well with me. Below is Brendan Waffle analyzing the dirt sample on the XRF.