Pictured l-r: Yoshi Ueno, Vincent Mao, Constantin Pistol, ORNL Director Jeff Wadsworth, Nano Nexus Managing Director Joy Fisher, Derek Gominger.
Team: N-TECT
Team Members: Constantin Pistol, Derek Gominger, Vincent Mao, Yoshi Ueno
School: Duke University
Faculty Advisors: Jon Fjeld, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Fuqua School of Business; Chris Dwyer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering; and Alvin Lebeck, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science
Product or Service: A nanoscale taggant for explosive chemical compounds that is both a strong pre-blast detection marker as well as an information-rich after-blast identifier. The N-TECT team believes their unique self-assembly manufacturing technique makes their product cost-effective to tag for detection not only commercial explosives, but also the chemical precursors of explosives such as ammonium nitrate fertilizers.
Technologically N-TECT has two main components. The first component is a resonator circuit that provides one to four bits of remotely electro-magnetically readable information. The second component is an array of metallic dots that can store 40 to160 bits of information readable using forensics microscopy. The two components are manufactured using DNA-guided self-assembly on chemically programmable DNA nano-grids. The result is an N-TECT tag roughly the size of a virus which can hold a large amount of after-blast readable information and is also pre-blast detectable through its unique electro-magnetic signature. The number of tags required to detect their signature depends on the sensitivity of the reader.
Competing technologies use high-vapor-pressure tagging substances which increase the chance of detection by sensitive chemical analyzers at security checkpoints. However, the relatively high amount of taggant needed keeps this method from being cost-effective for most explosives and also makes them susceptible to creating unwanted changes in an explosive’s physical properties. Furthermore, these detection-only markers do not store tracking information.
The team says competing identification tags like Microtrace™ can provide such information (encoded as molecular isotopes, color-coded particles, etc.) but not do not aid in detection. N-TECT tags are innovative because they provide both improved detection and identification capabilities in a single package at order-of-magnitude lower cost than competing, single purpose tags.
Their versatility alleviates the need to use distinct taggant types for different classes of explosives and can thus simplify detection, collection, recovery and analytical protocols. Low tag costs open the possibility of marking commercially available explosive precursors.
This is a critical factor which has significant security impact: statistics show that 97% of illegal bombings use precursors to make explosive compounds and only 3% use commercial explosives. Ammonium nitrate (more than 8 million tons produced/year in USA) is likely the greatest threat. N-TECT tags can not only signal the single presence of such chemicals, but also specifically alert to cases where two or more precursors are present together.
N-TECT’s target customers are U.S. explosives manufacturers, as well as manufacturers of chemical precursors to explosive materials, the most significant being ammonium nitrate, sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, and nitromethane. The team’s preliminary contact with major companies in the field shows positive interest in the N-TECT tagging technology.
The N-TECT team competed in the Nano I2P® Competition at Nano Nexus 2007, a nanotechnology conference hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on April 3, 2007. The conference brought together universities, entrepreneurs, and leaders of the nanotechnology industry in an effort to move nanotechnology out of research organizations and into the marketplace.