Bio-inspired Explosive Sensors and Specific Signatures

The low vapor pressure of explosives makes the gaseous detection challenging and drives even the particle detection. There is a need to provide easy portable systems, highly spreadable. A bio-inspired concept was developed to detect explosive vapors with unprecedent sensitivities. Vertically aligned TiO2 nanotubes were grown on a cantilever. The sensors successfully detected trinitrotoluene (TNT) and pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) with a minimum threshold concentration down to 0.8 ppt. This work describes also the investigations undertaken to develop the characterization of explosives by nanocalorimetry, which is able to identify explosives in form of single particles.