SERS-Enabled Direct Detection of Furfural in a Complex Oil Mixture.

Authors

Xiaoqin Zhang, Hongbin Zhu, Hao Liu, Jin Cao, Han Shi, Shanyuan Niu

Published in

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland). Volume 26. Issue 18. Sep 08, 2026. Epub Sep 08, 2026.

Abstract

Furfural is a pivotal indicator of the aging condition of transformer oil-paper insulation. Traditional analytical techniques such as liquid chromatography require sophisticated pretreatment and phase-separation procedures and are therefore not well suited to rapid oil-sample analysis. This study reports the direct analysis of furfural in complex oil mixtures using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). The weak vibrational response of furfural in oil was enhanced using a Au-coated silicon nanowire substrate fabricated by metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE). The textured metal-coated surface enabled trace furfural at the μL/L level to be measured directly in the oil mixture without adsorption enrichment or chemical extraction, with the entire test process completed within 1 min. Peak deconvolution was used to extract the fitted area of the 1365 cm^-1 band, and the relationship between this Raman response and furfural concentration yielded R² = 0.9910. Temperature- and pressure-dependent measurements were also performed to examine their effects on the positions of the main Raman peaks. This work demonstrates a rapid approach for analyzing trace furfural in complex liquid mixtures and provides a basis for further spectroscopic studies of transformer oil-paper insulation aging.

PMID:
42817238
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 01 Oct 2026.

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