SAW Array Personnel Monitor for the Detection of Toxic Chemicals

As a result of the Iraqi conflict, it is now commonly accepted that an increasing number of Third World countries either posses or are developing the capability to produce chemical weapons. This increasing weapons threat necessitates the development of highly sensitive and selective detection concepts that are small for portability, low power consumption for extended battery operation, simple to operate for use by combat troops and field upgradable as new chemical threats are identified. Using our current off-the-shelf commercial surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensor assemblies we plan to investigate the feasibility of dramatically reducing the size of our current hardware and to develop a design for a SAW array chemical sensor system to be used as a personnel monitor. The envisioned configuration of the partially functioning form factored prototype developed in this effort would be a self contained battery operated system with our current microcontroller hardware/software to control sample acquisition, data collection and pattern recognition analysis of the data.