Defence Online

New software detects hazardous chemicals in complex mixtures

Homeland August 25, 2016

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh, working with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), have pioneered a new chemical substance analysis software technique that could play a significant role in boosting current homeland security measures and illicit substance detection.

Ideally suited for portable hand-held spectroscopy devices, the system provides efficient, real-time analysis and identification of complex chemical mixtures using new Raman spectral decomposition techniques.

This approach, which is technology-agnostic, can handle large spectral databases to accurately pinpoint mixtures of chemical substances. Samples composed of a mixture of different chemicals provide a much greater detection challenge than pure materials, which are typically used in laboratory studies but not representative of real-world samples.

The University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation arm, Edinburgh Research & Innovation (ERI), is now seeking to license this technology to industry partners who wish to deploy it as part of a commercial hardware solution.

Mike Davies, Professor of Signal and Image Processing at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, said: “Inputting a set of reference spectra and an unknown mixture yields the identity of the mixture elements and also their contribution percentages. It also has the capability of identifying the presence of a spectral component outside the reference library. As such, it is a particularly powerful tool.”

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chemical Dstl Homeland homeland security Innovation Research University of Edinburgh

Post written by: Vicky Maggiani

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