Millville woman helps build explosive-testing device prototype
Alyssa Kelly, a URI student, worked on life-saving technology
KINGSTON—With the recent completion of the prototype for his bomb-sniffing device, Otto Gregory hopes the technology he and his students have worked hard on for over a decade may soon be used in venues all over to detect explosives and save lives.
“To see your work come to fruition and be used to help people,” Gregory said, “that’s really the end game.”
Gregory, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Rhode Island, began working on the technology through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 12 years ago. Then in 2008, URI was selected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Center of Excellence for Explosives Detection, Mitigation, and Response. From there, with funding from the DHS, Gregory and his crew shifted their emphasis from a military application to a homeland security application and “The Digital Dog Nose” was born.
The goal, Gregory explained, has been to come up with a way of detecting explosives not readily detectable by other means.
“Our technology detects the explosives in the vapor phase,” Gregory explained Wednesday. “Like a dog we sniff the air and try to detect explosives that way.”
Gregory and his students have over the last two years been working to hone a sensor which can detect the vapors of explosives used commonly by terrorists. Once explosive molecules hit the sensor, they break apart and release heat, setting off an alarm.
Although not all explosives leak vapor—for example, those used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing were made from black powder, which doesn’t have much of a vapor pressure—many of them do. The explosives used in the 2015 attacks in Paris and Brussels, for example, contained triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which would have given off a vapor the sensor on “The Digital Dog Nose” has been designed to detect.
The machine works best the closer it is to the source, Gregory explained. He said one application he and his team have envisioned is to keep the device in the turnstile doors of building entrances.
“You’re in the turnstile space for at least a few seconds,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great to sample everyone coming in without them knowing it for the possibility of having explosives— wouldn’t that be a good screening method?”
Explosives hiding in closed venues could be fairly easily detected.
“It couldn’t work in all applications,” he added. “Sometimes there’s just too much air, so to speak, to sample to get a signal.”
Still, the prototype has proven to work quite well. In field tests, it was able to detect one molecule of an explosive in a billion molecules of air.
“The testing exceeded our expectations,” said Andrew Rossi, of Portsmouth, who is pursuing his master’s degree in chemical engineering. “Both groups were impressed with our results. The prototype works—and works well.”
The technique is unlike CT scanning techniques used currently to detect bombs in airports. While CT scans are meant to find solid explosives, “The Digital Dog Nose” “sniffs” the air to alert of bomb vapors before the bomb has a chance to detonate.
Another commonly used practice in bomb detection, Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS) swabs to collect samples from bags or clothing, for example, to test for ex- plosives. But while that kind of technology uses batch processing, Gregory explained that his device constantly searches the air for explosives.
“It works continuously, whereas a lot of the techniques that are used in the airports are batch techniques— you have to swab a person or a bag, then that goes into a machine and you have to wait for the results,” he explained. “That’s different than ours.”
Results from “The Digital Dog Nose,” he continued, are “more or less instantaneous.”
Gregory also said his machine is different from others in its passivity.
“Just like you wouldn’t know a dog is smelling the space around you,” he said. “Our technique is totally non-invasive.”
But while the device behaves like a bomb-sniffing dog, it certainly doesn’t look like one. On its outside, the device resembles a toolbox.
“We were essentially taking something that was spread out on a big lab bench and condensing it into a small toolbox,” said URI junior Peter Ricci, of West Warwick. “We had to come up with the right box, tubing and piping.”
But in the end they were successful. The prototype weighs just 10 pounds, is portable and can be easily carried to various locations.
Gregory added that a fixed version of the technology might be used complementary to a CT scanning system.
“We would scan the space around the bag for vapors,” he said, “and the CT machine would scan the bag itself for solids.”
Aside from in appearance, Gregory pointed out some other notable ways the device differs from actual dogs. He called dogs “the gold standard.”
“A dog has the ability to add directionality to the detection,” he said. “A dog can find the plume and go in the direction of where the source of the explosives might be, and right now ours doesn’t have that ability.”
With a prototype completed last summer, Gregory and his students are now in the process of marketing the device to find a partner who will manufacture a product based on what’s been designed.
“The next step is to get somebody to license our technology and get it into the public arena,” Gregory added.
The team is also preparing to make a hand-held version of the prototype.
With success, “The Digital God Nose” may soon be placed at subway stations, train stations, airports and ports across the country.