Detección de explosivos con DMA

• Autores: Silvia López Vidal
• Localización: Boletín de observación tecnológica en defensa, ISSN-e 2444-4839, ISSN 2444-4847, Nº. 28 (tercer trimestre), 2010, págs. 20-23
• Idioma: español
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  • This article shows the latest results obtained from a collaboration research project between the Spanish Ministry of Defence and RAMEM. The PETN (Proyecto Español de Técnicas Novedosas en detección de explosivos) project from the Coincidente program deals with the development of new analytical techniques to analyse and detect traces of military, civilian or homemade explosives, the latter mainly used in terrorist attacks. The instrument developed is a high resolution Differential Mobility Analyser (DMA) and it is a special kind of aspiration type Ion Mobility Spectrometer. Ion Mobility Spectrometers (IMS) are widely used in airports for the detection of traces of explosives and narcotics.

    DMA is based on the measurement of the same physical property as in IMS, the electrical mobility of the molecular ions of the analyte. Some of the advantages of the DMA technique are higher resolving powers than in commercial IMS, which can potentially deliver a lower false positive and negative rates, and higher sensitivity.

    The experiments described in this report are made using a new prototype patented and Ultra-Violet (UV) light as ion source. The development of the prototype has been made in company’s facilities and tests have been made at the ITM. For the first time, nitro-based and homemade explosives have been detected using UV light and DMA.

    These results open a huge amount of possibilities either in explosives analysis or in detection for security.