Passive Infrared Detection of Liquids on Surfaces

Rapid detection of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) in the field can provide critical contamination avoidance and reconnaissance. CWAs pose a serious threat to both civilian and military sectors, and present techniques rely on dangerous collection methods, active measurement through external IR sources, and/or are time-consuming. EPIR proposes to meet this need through the development of a passive standoff hyperspectral long wavelength infrared (LWIR) focal plane array (FPA) with polarimetric capability that will utilize cold sky reflectance and spectroscopy techniques to identify chemical warfare agents quickly, accurately, and in a wide area. Phase I will focus on a proof of concept solution and feasibility study through the development of a cold sky reflectance model and a chemical identification algorithm. Milestones for Phase I include identifying chemical signatures of target contaminants and predicting the detector flux in terms of g/m2 of contaminant. Phase II will focus on prototype system design, construction and characterization. Phase III will focus on field-deployable system manufacturing and packaging.