University of Utah developed a hand-held device that is very useful for pilots and passengers which can protect people from bombs. There are some key ingredients in these bombs which is not chemically reactive. These bombs are made of Alkane fuel including homemade bombs. These are not easily detectable as these are odorless and colorless.

On Friday, March 25 of 2016, published the breakthrough material development for hand-held scanner. The traditional way of detecting this alkane is to us an oven sized instrument in laboratories. This is all done in American Chemical Society`s Journal ACS Sensors.

“It’s not mobile and very heavy,” Zang said, explaining about the old lab sized instrument, “there’s no way it can be used in the field. Imagine trying to detect a leak from gas valves…you ought to have something portable.”

“These are two materials that interact well together by having electrons transferring from one to the other. “When an alkane is present, it sticks in between the two materials, blocking the electron transfer between the two materials.”This interference would signal the detector that the alkane vapor is present”, said Ben Bunes at utah who is a postdoctoral fellow in materials science and engineering department.

This hand-held detector is developed by a team and this team is led by Professor Ling, Material Science and engineering department at University of Utah. The prototype of this hand-held detector is developed which will be able to detect a wide range of chemicals, for making it detect the explosives and avoid dangerous situations.

This hand-held device is useful to detect the leaks in airplane fuel tanks which is very helpful of many people. This can save many lives by detecting the leaks and warning the pilots that there is a leak and which leads to danger ahead. So that pilots will be alert.