Viability of smartphone spectroscopy as an alternative for UV-Vis spectroscopy experiments

Abstract

The Vernier SpectroVis Plus serves as a robust tool in performing UV-Vis spectroscopy experiments in educational environments. However, it is not an accessible tool for most secondary educational institutions due to its price and limited availability. A possible way to recreate UV-Vis spectroscopy experiments is by using a smartphone as a replacement for a spectrometer. Samples of food dye with varying concentrations were analyzed using both SpectroVis and a smartphone to obtain the calibration curves, calibration curve ranges, and detection of different solutes in a sample. Smartphone spectroscopy results show that you can obtain the qualitative dependence of absorbance on the concentration as it changes. However, smartphone spectroscopy is unable to distinguish wavelengths, so differentiating between different solutes in a sample is not possible. Thus, the current smartphone spectroscopy set-up is only viable for the qualitative analysis of the relationship between absorbance and concentration of single-solute, colored, liquid samples.