By mimicking how dogs get their whiffs, a team of government and university researchers in the United States fitted a dog-inspired plastic nose to an explosives detector, and reported improved efficiency.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), led byMatthew Staymates, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration fitted a dog-nose-inspired adapter to the front end of a commercially available explosives detector. Adding the artificial dog nose—made on a 3-D printer—to enable active sniffing improved odorant detection by up to 18 times, depending on the distance from the source.
"Applying this bio-inspired design principle could lead to significantly improved vapor samplers for detecting explosives, narcotics, pathogens—even cancer," according to Staymates.
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