Year
1990
Abstract
Research has been in progress for several years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop vapor detection technology that has application to the detection and identification of vapors from hidden high explosives, as well as potential uses in the international arms control verification arena (e.g. , detection and identification of chemical weapon agents and their precursor chemicals, and conventional arms verification related applications.) A first generation detector is presently in use as a security device at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant, and a second generation system is in development. It will be more sensitive, more specific, and smaller than the first generation device. The Oak Ridge detectors are both very sensitive and very specific. The high specificity results in low false positive rates. While built for the detection of explosives, the Oak Ridge detectors can be used for a wide variety of other compounds with little or no change in the hardware.