CUSTOM (Drugs And PreCUrsor Sensing By ComplemenTing Low COst Multiple Techniques )
CUSTOM IS AN EUROPEAN FP7 PROJECT (242387)
Law enforcement agencies world-wide are keenly aware that chemical control is a crucial element to controlling the manufacture and distribution of illegal narcotics and synthetic substances.
For this purpose, the project CUSTOM, financed by the EUROPEAN COMMISSION within the FP7, aims to perform chemical identifications in contexts such as custom offices, inspection of trucks, cars, containers, as well as people and baggage.
Such components should be assembled as simple machine to be employed on-field by the operators with no specific skill. Thus detection approach should use established techniques so that processing of rough data by means of the incorporated software tool can provide unambiguous response.
A large number of techniques have been developed in the latest decades, which are able to screen and identify specific molecules even at very low concentration in lab testing.
Nevertheless the objective to build up a system which proves to be easy to use, compact, able to provide screening over a large number of compounds and discriminate them with low false alarm (FA) and high probability of detection (POD) is still an open issue.
The project will focus on the point detection methodologies due to its applicability in custom, airport and arbour scenarios. The two complementary technologies are the LASER Photo Acoustic Spectroscopy and the UV induced Fluorescence.
