Experimental Design Using a Quartz Crystal Microbalance to Investigate the Transport of Explosive Vapors from Enclosed and Buried IEDs

With support of the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Research Laboratory, Laboratories for Computational Physics will study the transport of explosives vapors from simulated buried improvised explosive devices (IEDs) through soil under varying conditions. Here a literature survey was conducted to aid in the design of a novel instrumental analysis method utilizing a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) to measure the adsorption/desorption of analyte vapors (DNT and TNT) onto soil, sand, and plastic-coated sensors to validate the transport models. The QCM will provide the means to experimentally measure the adsorption/desorption properties of explosive vapors providing the necessary coefficients to necessary for the computational models.