LA JOLLA, Calif. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- From terrorist bombings on the ground and in the air, t-a-t-p, a peroxide-based explosive has been used in many suicide bombings. There's no easy way to detect the chemical in the field. But now, that is about to change.
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In 2005 terrorists blew up subway trains in London using homemade bombs made of a peroxide called TATP. The same explosive shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to use to blow up an airliner in 2001.
But terrorists may soon find their bombs harder to hide. Inside a machine, a team of physicists and chemists built an electronic nose able to sniff out the explosive chemical.
No bigger than a penny, the sensor chip can detect the tiniest traces of hydrogen peroxide vapor. Normally, thin films of copper and cobalt phthalocyanine conduct the same level of electrical current when exposed to gas. But add hydrogen peroxide vapor … and copper's current strength increases while cobalt's decreases.
"This material that is absorbed on the chip is a peroxide," Ivan Schuller, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, Calif., told Ivanhoe.
"About 50 or so molecules we, and others, have looked at it's the only one that will give this opposite behavior," William Trogler, professor of chemistry at UCSD said.
Small and low-powered, it fits in a variety of packages for use by the military or homeland security.
"As a checkpoint monitor in airports that sort of thing to screen people as they're coming through. Have they been handling this type of explosive?" Todd Mlsna, Ph.D., president of Seacoast Science, Inc., told Ivanhoe.
The chip can distinguish between types of peroxide, so your whitening toothpaste won't raise alarms. And they're cheap -- once mass produced these sensors could be made for less than a dollar a chip. A small price to pay to save lives.
The Materials Research Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., The American Physical Society, and the American Industrial Hygiene Association contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
