CAMBRIDGE, Mass., 10 Feb. 2008. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., are developing a tiny sensor able to detect minute quantities of chemical warfare agents, much more quickly than current devices.
The sensor also could be used to detect toxic industrial chemicals and other hazardous gases.
The researchers have fit gas chromatography and mass spectrometry onto a device the size of a computer mouse. Eventually, the team, led by MIT Professor Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande, plans to build a detector about the size of a matchbox.
The research, which started three years ago, is funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., and the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass.
"Everything we're doing has been done on a macro scale. We are just scaling it down," says Akinwande, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and member of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL).
Akinwande and MIT research scientist Luis Velasquez-Garcia presented their work at the IEEE MEMS 2008 conference last January in Tucson, Ariz.
Scaling down gas detectors not only eases their use in applications where they could be dispersed inside buildings or outdoors, but also reduces power consumption and enhances their sensitivity to trace amounts of gases, Akinwande says.
He is leading an international team that includes scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Texas at Dallas, Clean Earth Technology, and Raytheon, as well as MIT.
Current versions of portable GC-MS machines, which take about 15 minutes to produce results, are about the size of a paper bag of groceries, and use 10,000 joules of energy. The new version consumes about four joules and produces results in about four seconds. The tiny sensors also can be precisely built using microfabrication.
This story appeared 13 Jan. in Small Times. Click here to read the original article.
