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Dynamic chamber puts chemical weapons sensors to the test
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Applied Physics Laboratory engineers have constructed a first-of-its-kind chamber to test the viability of sensors designed to detect chemical warfare agents under realistic battlefield conditions.
While the use of chemical weapons was outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, terrorists have increasingly deployed chemical armaments against civilian and military populations over the past decade. “Our military operates over a wide range of battlefield conditions, whether it be in the high mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq or off ships at sea,” notes Thomas Buckley, of APL’s National Security Technology Department and the Laboratory’s project manager for this effort. “All of these are potential venues for adversary use of chemical warfare agents.”
The chamber provides realistic test conditions for evaluating how quickly military detectors pick up trace level amounts of chemical warfare agents, Buckley says. “It operates over a wide range of temperature, humidity and simulated altitude while exposing the chemical agent detectors to interferents such as dust, smoke and diesel exhaust,” he says. “Its control systems will allow the monitoring, displaying and recording of data from the systems under test [SUTs] in conjunction with the DTC challenge conditions to allow analysis of the response of the SUT in real time.”