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The US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command – Chem Bio center is leading an inter-agency working group, to expand chemical inkjet printing techniques, and to fabricate surface standards in a controlled, uniform and quantifiable fashion, for the evaluation of stand-off active and passive optical systems. A CommercialOff-the-Shelf (COTS) standard inkjet printer was redesigned to deposit precise amounts of chemicals and explosive material on defense relevant surfaces, allowing for the generation of calibration test standards. RDECOM-CB is currently utilizing the inkjet techniques to support an Army forensics detection program where inkjet samples are used for detection of trace energetic materials and illicit drugs of abuse within residual latent fingerprints, as well as leading a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Task Group (TG) to develop and recommend to NATO a reference standard methodology (or methodologies) for fabricating quantifiable surface standards for the evaluation of stand-off active and passive optical systems. QA/QC were performed on printed materials to determine accuracy and precision. Raman imaging and the Image-J software package was used to calculate particle statistics such as size distribution, average particle size, and fill factor. The software algorithm finds individual particles and calculates their area from a brightfield image montage. An approximate diameter of each particle, and the total fractional area of the surface covered are also calculated. For qualitative analysis Raman Chemical Imaging is performed to confirm the chemical make-up of the deposited samples. For the quantitative analysis, printed samples were analyzed by either Ion Chromatography with Conductivity Detection (IC-CD) for potassium chlorate based explosives analysis or LC-MS/MS for RDX analysis. We will present the results of inkjet samples produced for the Army forensics program as well as NATO benchmark exercise that consisted of printing trace amounts of inkjet explosive samples and performing QA/QC procedures to determine accuracy, precision and mass transport efficiency.
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