Imagine a smoke detector not just for fires, but for deadly toxins—one that could sit quietly in an airport, train station, or even on a soldier’s uniform, ready to warn of chemical dangers like sarin gas.
That’s exactly what a team at Sandia National Laboratories has been working on for the past three years: creating a chemical sensor that can detect dangerous airborne toxins while using almost no power, and can last for years without needing a battery change.
Sarin is a nerve agent so toxic it can kill within minutes. While its production is banned worldwide, it has sadly been used in terrorist attacks.
That’s why having an early warning system is so important.
The Sandia team designed their sensor with the goal of making it as reliable and long-lasting as a common smoke detector—but for far more dangerous substances.
The heart of the sensor is a sponge-like material called a sol-gel, which acts like a chemical trap.
When sprayed onto tiny electronic parts shaped like interlocking metal combs, this material forms an open, foamy structure.
This design gives sarin molecules plenty of places to land. Once they stick to the material, the electrical properties of the sensor change. These changes are tiny but enough for the electronics to notice—and trigger a warning.
Because the system is meant to sit in the field for years, power use is a huge concern.
To address this, the team worked with researchers at the University of Virginia to design a special microchip that reads the sensor data while using barely any energy.
This chip is incredibly small—built with features thousands of times thinner than a human hair—and was made at one of the world’s most advanced chip factories in Taiwan.
The engineers had to be creative when putting the sensor together.
Normally, chips this small are hard to handle, but the team found a way to embed them into a full-size silicon wafer using a high-powered laser and a custom polymer filler, creating a tiny but complete system.
They tested both small-scale and full versions of the sensor, and although the full system used slightly more power at first, they believe they can reduce this with more development.
The prototype sensor works—and now the team wants to improve it even more. With extra funding, they hope to expand the device’s abilities so it can detect several dangerous chemicals at once, making it an even more powerful tool for public safety and defense.
