pH Indicators As Chemical Reagents for the Enhancement of Footwear Marks

Abstract

Abstract Enhancement of weak two-dimensional shoemarks is often necessary due to the poor image detail. Thiocyanate is regarded in the literature as the most effective reagent for the chemical enhancement of footwear marks. In this study we have examined the possibility of using pH indicators, Bromophenol Blue and Bromocresol Green, as chemical reagents for the enhancement of footwear marks. The performance of these reagents on various surfaces, such as plastic sheets, brown paper, cardboard, porcelain bathroom tiles and cotton cloth, was compared to that of the thiocyanate reagent. It was found that these reagents were much more effective than ammonium thiocyanate for the samples of shoeprints in various regions of Israel. The mechanism of chemical enhancement of footwear marks by these reagents was elucidated. A solution of 1% Bromophenol Blue and 5% of water in methanol was chosen as the Bromophenol Blue formulation in this laboratory for the chemical enhancement of shoeprints.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.