Hand-held scanner for detecting hazardous substances and explosives

Within the EU project CHEQUERS, the

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Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF and its partners have jointly developed a hand-held scanner for the remote detection of explosives and hazardous substances. "Our hazardous substance scanner covers a large spectral range in no time, provides precise results and can even be used by untrained personnel. This is extremely useful at crime scenes, after terroristic attacks or after accidents in industrial plants in which chemicals spread in an uncontrolled way. Rescue forces can react immediately to the threat," explains Dr. Stefan Hugger, project manager and scientist at Fraunhofer IAF.

The consortium of CHEQUERS faced the technical challenge to realize a hand-held system for remote detections of hazardous substances from a safe distance and with fast reaction time. The result is a measuring device based on infrared backscattering spectroscopy. The research team combined very fast widely tunable quantum cascade lasers with adjusted transmission and receiver optics, fast IR detectors and a fitting control and detection software.

The research took place within the project "Compact high performance laser sensors," CHEQUERS for short (www.chequers.eu). Since 2015, Fraunhofer IAF collaborated with the Fraunhofer Institutes IPMS and CAP, the Federal Criminal Police Office, as well as the companies Vigo Systems, M Squared Lasers and Modus Research and Innovation, in order to develop a hand-held scanner for hazardous substances. CHEQUERS was funded by the European Union within the program Horizon 2020. On April 25, 2019, the project partners me to successfully close the project in Brussels.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hand-held-scanner-hazardous-substances-explosives.html