So like I know in atleast American airports you can get randomly selected or if your bag is searched they run a little swab on your hands or stuff. They say it’s for explosives residue which makes sense to check for but how do these tests work?
It seems like explosives could be made out of a huge variety of things that are accessible. Two easy ones that come to mind are gunpowder and gasoline. What test shows all the main potential explosive ingredients? Or do they just only check for a couple?
In: Chemistry
many common detectors I have seen at US airports are based upon ion mobility spectrometry (usually using a product under the Smiths brand name).
Wikipedia has a pretty detailed article on the subject, although this kind of analysis could be its own unit of a college course, but trying to summarize: the mobility of an ion in a gas phase moving through an electric field of known strength is can be compared against known values for common targets substances.
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