ABSTRACT
Nearly every terrorist attack involves explosives. There are fundamental limitations to the techniques in significantly reducing the size, weight, power consumption, and quantification of detecting trace explosives. The development of nanotechnology potentially provides a feasible solution for building substantially smaller, highly sensitive, and selective trace explosive detectors through the use of a variety of nanostructured materials. TiO2-B is Trace Explosive Sensor Based on Titanium Oxide-B Nanowires one of the crystal polymorphs of TiO2. In order to improve the performance of the sensor further, a series of experiments were designed to study how the molecular polarity and electron deficiency influence the charge transfer process between nitro-containing explosives and TiO2-B. The mechanism of TiO2-B nanowires to effectively detect explosive vapors will be discussed, and in the final section we will point out new potential improvements that can be developed to further increase the sensing properties of TiO2-B nanowires as explosive sensors.
