The process proposed by NTA is not a simple miniaturization process of standard “macroscopic” measurement devices (e.g. standard pressure gauge or gas analyzer): the latter, even if widely in use nowadays, is meant to reduce costs by optimizing processes and simplifying a few components, but the trade-off between miniaturization processes and measurements’ sensitivity and resolution is still huge.
Current analytical detection in homeland security applications are complex, large and sometime expensive equipment to perform measurements, and generally for these reasons are not conducted in a massive way but on samples.
Nowadays, even if more tailored technologies (IMS, SAW-MS, GC-SAW) are used in order to reduce dimensions, time of analyses, deployment costs and a better portability, such systems still cannot avoid in any case to have relatively huge inlet gas flow to deal with, consequently demanding almost always differential vacuum sections, complicated manifold systems and vacuum pumps.
On the contrary, NTA technology can drastically change the way to perform the measures leading to an extreme instrumentation simplification. Thus, NTA universal nano-instruments offer significant technological and competitive advantages: miniaturization, universality, portability, high performance and reliability of these nano-instruments make them easy to be interfaced in active and proactive way into customers’ systems.
Finally, from a social perspective, NASUM will contribute to increase the safety in transportation and critical infrastructures segments. Indeed, following recent ISIS terror attacks at airports (Brussels, Istanbul etc.), the importance of an effective European airport security environment and its effect on the aviation security market has become a key issue. The same is applicable to reduce the vulnerabilities of European critical infrastructure sites.
