Vulnerability of critical indoor infrastructures to chemical terrorist attacks poses a significant point of concern for Member States authorities responsible for incident preparedness and prevention. The range of possibilities for terrorist attacks involving toxic chemicals is wide. In any event, an attack using unconventional weapons would certainly cause serious economic and social disruption to normal, day-to-day activities.
In all areas of countermeasures against CBRNE attacks, be it threat assessment, prevention, preparedness, response or recovery it is crucial to be able to detect and, if possible, identify the threatening material. Thus, the existence of early warning detection systems is critical for preventing casualties.
SENSOFT pursues, for the first time, the comprehensive study of early warming nanoenabled detection systems in the area of CBRN protection by means of knowledge-sharing-based cooperation between academia, specialized research centres and industry. The proposed research and innovative programme goes far beyond the SoT and SoA in chemical threats detection, by moving from conventional portable instrumentation and discrete sensing units towards a next generation of pervasive, interconnected orthogonal detection system for fast and reliable response.
The vision of SENSOFT encompasses a novel class of unattended and cost-effective sensing and sampling networks for indoor air monitoring on soft vulnerable places. The development of a wireless gas sensing network consisting of orthogonal and ultrasensitive microsensors and gas preconcentration/ sampling network comprising advanced molecular traps and SERS substrates will enable both:
-rapid first-alarm to improve situational awareness
-reliable hazard identification for alarm confirmation
The close cooperation among multidisciplinary partners from research institutions and SMEs will ensure knowledge transfer between academia and business in order to convert an academic concept to a viable and innovative product.
SENSOFT will contribute towards the development of a wireless gas sensing-sampling network for chemical threats detection consisting of: i) ultrasensitive microsensors modified with nanostructured materials integrated in cost-effective smart tags; and, ii) preconcentration-sampling nodes comprising advanced specific molecular traps and Surface Enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates for the analysis by a miniaturised, commercial, portable Raman spectrometer. Figure 1 depicts the overall concept for the operational/operative detection of chemical threats. The deployment of cooperative tools for first warning and reliable identification facilitates the mission thanks to some definite advantages: they are robust to failure as there are numerous and ubiquitous tags and sampling nodes deployed on the location; detection and identification tasks can be accomplished more quickly, and cross-checking of sampling nodes with a broader set of conventional analytical instrumentation, apart from Raman spectrometer, is allowed.
Figure 1 (uploaded).
