Bomb Detection Made 10 Times Easy With Graphene Foam!

#-Link-Snipped-# for the police squads, however making it more efficient is the need of hour. The bombs which are mostly detected from presence of Ammonia and Nitrogen Dioxide cannot be traced at low concentrations. Today's gas sensors can only work effectively if any of these gases are present with amount 1000 ppm or more. Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute co-led by Prof. Nikhil Koratkar and Prof. Hui-Ming Cheng have developed a way which is 10 times more efficient than these gas sensors.

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Image Credit: Nikhil Koratkar

Traditionally it has always been difficult to use single nanostructure to detect NH3 and NO2. This is because the resulting device is fragile, involves complex time consuming processes and costly. Koratkar and his team have developed Graphene foam which can detect the gases present in these bombs even at a low concentration as 100ppm. The device same as the size of a postal stamp can be used effectively until a minimum concentration of 20ppm of gases.

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Image Credit: Nikhil Koratkar

The Graphene foam so developed has shown results repeatedly without any discrepancy. In the actual experiment, when the Graphene foam was subjected to 100ppm concentration of NH3 or NO2, there was a change of 10% in resistance of the detector at room temperature and atmospheric pressure within 5-10 minutes. This is true with the conventional gas detectors also but the concentration has to be 1000ppm or more. The research took place at Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Koratkar and his team aimed to make a macro scale model of the individual nanostructures. This resulted in the Graphene foam which is porous structure. More over this 3D form is also robust and easy to handle hence there is no doubt of it being damaged. The peculiarity of Graphene foam gas detector is it’s repeatable and reversible of results. This makes it the best gas detectors available until now. Researchers are also trying to engineer the material so developed to detect other gases than just remaining limited to Nitrogen and its compounds.

The research was presented in Journal #-Link-Snipped-# titled, #-Link-Snipped-#. Also see the video with Prof. Nikhil Koratkar explaining his research.