WASHINGTON – Shampoo? White wine? Or a powerful homemade explosive?
Anyone who’s ever tried to pack for air travel is aware of the Transportation Security Administration’s tight regulations on quantities of liquids, aerosols and gels onboard.
The restrictions are in place because it’s difficult and time-consuming to distinguish between liquids that appear identical.
While neither X-rays or Magnetic Resonance Imaging alone can identify liquid in a bottle, scientists at Los Alamos have combined the two technologies into a system they call MagRay.
“One of the challenges for the screening of liquids in an airport is that, while traditional X-ray based baggage scanners provide high throughput with good resolution of some threats, there is limited sensitivity and selectivity for liquid discrimination,” says Michelle Espy, a Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist and MagRay project leader.
“While MRI can differentiate liquids, there are a certain class of explosives, those that are complex, homemade, or may have mixes of all kinds of stuff that are more challenging,” Espy says.
The project is funded by the Department of Homeland Security.
When the liquid is scanned, a 3-D image includes MRI, proton content and X-ray density, says MagRay engineer Larry Schultz.
“With those measures we find that benign liquids and threat liquids separate real nicely in this space, so we can detect them quickly with a very high level of confidence,” Schultz says.
Watch how the MagRay screening system works:
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