Brilliant Material Irradiates Explosive Detection

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As the terrorist attack on the Brussels airports and metro station clearly demonstrate, currently prevalent methods of explosive detection are severely lacking. While laser-based detection systems are showing great promise, adoption is slow in part due to costs. Detection methods popular today are mostly chemical-based, and these have their own limitation.

Detectors commonly used by airport staff are laden with polymers that are fluorescent in their normal state. When explosive materials are detected in the vicinity, the fluorescence disappears. Sadly, however, fluorescence in these materials is affected not only by explosives.

“The problem was that several factors could make the fluorescence disappear; a number of salts for example had this effect. Thus these substances could give off a false alarm,” explains Steffen Bähring, researcher from the University of Southern Denmark.

Bähring and his team have created a new material that turns fluorescent only in the presence of the explosive TNB and some specific salts based on fluorine and chlorine.

“There can only be two reasons why it turns fluorescent, one of them being the presence of explosives. Thus this material is a highly reliable tool for detecting explosives,” says Bähring.

Bähring and his team hope that this material could lead to the creation of new types of explosive detectors with a much lower false-positive rate. This would make it much easier for airport staff to get the accurate results they need straightaway.

“This new knowledge could lead to creating a small device based on this set of molecules,” Bähring says. “With such a device security staff in airports could [for example] test if there are explosives molecules on or near a bag.”