New Materials for Smart Fabric Chemical Agent Sensors

Defense against chemical weapons is a critical DoD requirement. An effective defense requires the development of a combination of unique clothing systems that provide a physical barrier to toxic vapors, liquids, and aerosols, as well as a system to detect chemical threats. Protective clothing and detection systems currently exist, but ideally the detection equipment should be miniaturized and integrated into to the clothing. A straightforward concept for developing a “smart cloth” uniform with built-in detection sensors is to incorporate small sensors into existing fabrics. These sensors would be lightweight, flexible, durable and highly sensitive to detect the agents of interest. They would also ideally communicate with the other sensors in the area and be compatible with other similar forward-deployed sensors. Such a sensor laden smart-fabric would benefit the DoD by reducing the weight burden and logistics of providing combination clothing and sensor systems, thus eliminating the need to carry larger sensor equipment. In this Phase II SBIR project TDA Research, Inc. will develop and test (against both simulants and live agents) new sensor materials needed to make these smart cloth chemical agent sensors a reality, and demonstrate an RFID tag-based sensor and reader system.