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A new analytical method could help airport security personnel locate explosives in opaque plastic bottles without having to rifle through suitcases or prepare samples, writes Erika Gebel in Chemical & Engineering News. The method may also be useful for forensic applications.
Freek and colleagues at VU University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands have developed a method that uses time-resolved Raman spectroscopy (TRRS) to provide chemical information for identifying concealed hazardous materials such as explosives inside plastic containers. The method provides more detailed information than X-rays.
Gebel explains:
The idea behind TRRS is that, after a laser excites a sample, the first photons back to the spectrometer are those emitted from the molecules on the sample’s surface, because they have the shortest distance to travel. Researchers avoid these signals by closing the gate in front of the spectrometer’s detector for the first few hundred picoseconds after excitation, Ariese says. Then they open the gate in time to receive the photons and chemical information from deep within the sample.
Ariese and his colleagues provide additional details about their experiments in a journal article. They used a picosecond pulsed laser and an intensified charge-coupled device detector to noninvasively detect explosive materials through several millimeters of polymer-based materials.
They tested powdered dinitrotoluene, a byproduct of TNT, and components of other explosive mixtures, and collected spectra that confirm the method’s ability to identify explosives inside the containers. The containers were made of diffusely-scattering white polymer, including polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), polyoxymethylene (POM), and polyethylene (PE). The researchers also tested common packaging materials of various thicknesses including polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride.
Will Raman be coming to airport security lines soon? Maybe. Although the method can’t get past metal containers, Ariese tells Gebel it could be applicable to real-world situations because the laser could be tuned to different wavelengths to examine containers made of materials such as cardboard.
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