Unique Technology Finds Trace Levels of Drugs and Explosives

Instrumentation specialist Quantitech has signed an agreement with the Canadian company TeknoScan Systems Inc to introduce a highly advanced technology for banned substance detection, to the UK market.

Keith Golding, Quantitech Managing Director, said: "TeknoScan’s technology represents a major advance in the fight against terrorism and organised crime. The problem with existing technology has been a lack of selectivity; the inability to identify target substances in a chemically ’noisy’ environment. Until now the most sensitive detector has been the nose of a specially trained dog. However, TeknoScan has developed a highly sensitive and selective portable system that has major advantages over existing techniques, not least of which is the ability to detect target substances from a library containing up to 50 separate compounds all at once."

TeknoScan has demonstrated detection and identification of threat substances from samples as small as 0.1 nanograms in a polluted environment. Therefore, there is an extremely high probability of detection if an individual, object or container has been in contact with a target substance, even if masking agents are present.

The complete TeknoScan Analyser is approximately the size of a briefcase and provides complete analysis of a sample in 3 minutes or less. TeknoScan Systems Vice President, Larry Wardrop, believes that the new technology will be utilised in a wide variety of applications. He said: "Screening of all types of air cargo, container traffic and the vehicles crossing our borders is available to us through this technology. In addition to the sampling equipment that we are developing for containers and packages, we also have versions that enable the testing of individuals, cars, trucks, caravans, hotel rooms and even large meeting venues such as music and sports stadia."