Passive Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) Chemical Sensors for Homeland Security Applications

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. This new selective chemical-sensing approach was realized using an attractive ubiquitous platform of battery-free passive radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags adapted for chemical sensing. In the numerous laboratory and field experiments, the action of several response mechanisms in a single sensing film to different vapors was demonstrated, which resulted in the independent detection of these responses with individual RFID sensors and correction for variable ambient conditions, including high levels of ambient relative humidity (RH). Performance of developed RFID sensors is illustrated in measurements of toxic industrial materials (TIMs) with the detection limit of 15–80 ppb, humidity-independent (0–76% RH) detection of toxic organic vapors, and selective determination of blood chemical agent (CA) simulants with individual sensors. Keywords: radiofrequency identification (RFID) sensor; chemical sensing; multivariate statistical analysis; chemical agents; biological agents; toxic industrial materials

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