This is an amazing invention. A device that can “smell†out the remaining tiny amounts of mustard gas and Lewis gas can help protect those who are responsible for cleaning chemical weapons.
Identifying these mysterious molecules often requires complicated equipment and slow preparation steps to focus the sample. Instead, this new method utilizes steam in the air to treat the pre-analytical sample.
The device sucks in air, which may contain chemical weapons samples, and uses the electric shock to charge the water vapor to decompose the chemical components in the sample. The reverse air flow will take away any highly reactive ions produced by the shock. Of course, electric shocks may also destroy a small number of decomposed chemical weapons. The remaining components are then discerned by the mass spectrometer.
Yasuo Seto from the Japan Science Police Research Institute dominated the study. He said that the detection device can detect gas with a concentration of only 1% of the lethal level and has begun to search for chemical weapons abandoned in China after World War II.