The ability to characterize suspect facilities for intelligence or counterforce purposes will rely heavily on the ability to identify chemical effluents from such facilities. Sandia is developing a complete micro-scale chemical analysis system named .tChemLabTM. This system will be extremely small and low power because of the utilization of integrated circuit fabrication techniques. The use of monolithic integration of such components as chemical preconcentration, separation, and detection, along with the eventual integration of micromachined pumps and valves, will not only lead to a dramatic size reduction, but also lead to the dramatic cost reduction that has been realized with monolithic integration of electronics. It will become practical to deploy large numbers of unattended chemical analysis systems for sensing low concentration effluents at high priority targets. iChemLabTM uses an array of serial and parallel separations channels (columns), each of which separates compounds on the basis of different "orthogonal" chemical properties, followed by highly sensitive detection techniques: laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) in the liquid phase and arrays of acoustic wave devices in the gas phase. This array of separations will create a characteristic, highly specific signature for a compound. Identification of target species based on the combined results of multiple separations will have an extremely low false alarm rate because each separation is statistically independent. Because the separations will be run simultaneously in microchannels, analyses times are on the order of a few minutes. The necessary sample handling and detection systems will be implemented using microfabricated electronic, optical and fluidic components.

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