Characteristics of Trace Explosives Particles in Fingerprints for Optical Detection

摘要

Trace particle quantities of explosives left behind by those handling explosives materials present an opportunity toidentify both the handlers, secondary handlers and the objects they have contacted. Understanding the nature of theseparticles is critical for tailoring optical detection strategies as well as non-optical contact harvesting methods. We areworking towards developing a model to understand and quantify the nature of particles transferred from the hands todifferent substrate surfaces. In this preliminary paper we report on a newly developed finger test-bed to produce arobotically controlled series of fingerprints, with an artificial finger designed to mimic the physicochemical properties ofthe human finger. In an initial set of experiments, we examine the effect of a range of applied forces, the effect of arange of initial particle sizes, and the serial print number on the deposited mass and deposited particle sizes, for asurrogate explosive loaded as particles on gloved fingers which are subsequently pressed against a set of clean glassslides.