Last Wednesday I attended the seminar on “Detection Systems for Biological threats” in London, organised by the Sensors & Instrumentation KTN. There was a good range of speakers and attendees from industry, academia and government, and some interesting and thought-provoking talks.

Dr. Ian Lawston - chief scientist at the Dstl detection department - discussed the performance requirements for detection technologies. Apart from the obvious needs for sensitive detection of as many threats as possible, he emphasised that currently improvements are most needed not in the detection technology itself, but in the area of sample collection and processing. Real-life samples are inhomogenous, messy and full of contaminants - and in many cases sample prep will take far more time and require far greater skill then doing the actual detection.

Supt. Steve Doel of the Police National CRBN Centre stated that at present the police does not have any approved means of detecting biological threats - so there is a very strong need for robust, cost-effective solutions which can give the level of confidence required for typical police scenarios (e.g. evacuation or quarantine of airports).

There were a number of presentation on various detection technologies. What struck me is that these tend to be stand-alone systems - the raw sensor data is interpreted in an integrated device and processed into a simple recommendation without taking other factors into account. It could give significant benefits if instead all of the different detection modalities would feed their raw sensing data into one intelligent processing unit that would base it’s output on the combination of sensing results. This would require a common language to express the raw sensing data, and the need to build up combination profiles for certain threats. Any comments?

For the upcoming Lent term I’ll once again be mentoring a group of students doing an i-Teams project. This term we’ll be looking at which applications for carbon nanotubes would benefit most from a production process that slashes the cost of producing nanotubes by an order of magnitude - a production process developed by a group lead by Prof. Derek Fray of the Department of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge

Unlike most current production technologies the new process creates carbon nanotubes from the solid phase - from graphite. This means that production is far more efficient and production capacity is greatly increased.

Prof. Fray’s team has also shown that they can modify the production process to produce carbon nanotubes that are filled with metals such as tin. The use of these filled nanotubes in Li-ion batteries has shown to greatly increase their capacity per unit weight - a very important consideration for future generations of hybrid or all-electric vehicles.

In the course of doing client- or internal projects we sometimes come up with ideas for spin-off products. Some of these we’ll bring to market ourselves under the mju-tec brand.

The first mju-tec product will be the PAM401 4-channel pico-ammeter. PAM401 is a USB device so a standard PC is used to control the instrument and view the results. The most sensitive range will measure currents up to 15pA with 20-bit resolution - in this case measurement bandwidth is limited to 1 sample per second. Maximum sampling rate is 3kHz for full-scale ranges of 50nA and upward to 7000nA.

PAM401 pico-ammeter

We’re still fleshing out the application software and are open to suggestions from potential clients - let us know what features would be useful.