Wiley Handbook of Science and Technology for Homeland Security, 4 Volume Set

PASSIVE RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION (RFID) CHEMICAL SENSORS FOR HOMELAND SECURITY APPLICATIONS

RADISLAV A. POTYRAILO, CHERYL SURMAN, AND WILLIAM G. MORRIS

General Electric Global Research Center, Niskayuna, New York

1 INTRODUCTION

Development of new sensors is driven by the ever-expanding homeland security monitoring needs for the determination of chemical, biological, and nuclear threats [1–4]. Over the last several decades, numerous principles of detection have been discovered, followed by the design and implementation of practical sensors and sensor arrays. New technologies for the detection of threats of importance to homeland security must be sensitive enough to detect agents below health risk levels, selective enough to provide minimal false-alarm rates, and rapid enough to enable an effective medical response [1]. This article provides a brief overview of chemical and biological threats, focuses in detail on modern concepts in chemical sensing, examines the origins of the most significant unmet needs in existing chemical sensors, and introduces a new philosophy in selective chemical sensing. This new approach for selective chemical sensing involves the combination of a sensing material that has different response mechanisms to different species of interest with a transducer that has a multivariable signal transduction ability to detect these independent changes. In the numerous laboratory and field experiments, the action of several response mechanisms in a single sensing ...