Dr Jamie Barras will be the head of the Humanitarian Technologies Lab inside the Department of Informatics on King’s College London.

The lab exists to be able to develop new technologies to supply humanitarian assistance to people today in need. King’s is usually raising funds for Jamie’s undertaking, to run field trials to find out an explosive detector to get clearing landmines, which will improve landmine detection and ultimately lead to saving more lives.

“My fervent hope could be that the world will one day be free from the threats caused by means of landmines and explosive remnants involving war” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (The Strategy in the United Nations on Landmines 2013 – 2018, Record published 2012)

Challenges together with Landmines

Landmines Kill in addition to maim and keep towns impoverished long after the conflict has ended. Daily people lose their lifestyles to landmines; children will be particularly vulnerable: “…children are far more prone to die from their quarry injuries than are grownups. Of those maimed infants who survive, few will receive prostheses that keep up with the continued growth of the stunted limbs. ” (UNICEF, Impact of Armed Conflict with Children).

On top of this devastating problem, approaches to clearing landmines plus unexploded ordnance are however rooted in technologies developed in the 1940s. When applied towards field of humanitarian demining – repairing landmines post-conflict – the place that the requirement is that 100% of landmines present in an area be taken out, they are time-consuming, labour-intensive, and will be dangerous. This can make humanitarian demining a slow-moving, expensive and risky business.

Landmine Detection Technology

We feel that landmine detection could be much better. Technologies now exist which often, if adapted to that challenges of humanitarian demining, could speed up the clearance of landmines, saving lives and release land for communities to make use of. One such technology will be “quadrupole resonance, ” a technical name for your radiofrequency-based explosives sensor – the device that identifies that presence (or absence) connected with explosives by sending released bursts of radio waves and listening for any distinctive signatures of explosives inside the gaps between.

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This is certainly different to radar, where radio waves bounce off objects enabling you to know that something there has to be, but not specifically just what exactly that object is. Along with quadrupole resonance, the radio waves are absorbed from the molecules of the object we making the effort to find – in this specific case, an explosive – which absorbed energy is then retransmitted for many people to detect. The major thing is: this only happens if your frequency of the r / c waves matches that of among the absorption modes of the particular molecule; and different substances have different absorption frequencies. So we never befuddle an explosives signature for your of something innocuous – or even, indeed, the signature of one explosive with the of another.

Technical troubles

First, there are technical troubles of adapting quadrupole resonance to get humanitarian demining – this signals we detect are very weak, so we needed to develop better ways to pick them up. The equipment we used before is made for this laboratory; we needed for making it simple, rugged and cheap for deployment inside the field.

We believe we have an item of kit that can get the job done – our AQUAREOS technique (Advanced Quadrupole Resonance centered Explosives Ordnance Sensor). But now we have to prove that. And prove that on the satisfaction of the people along at the sharp end of demining – the people who must stake their lives on which our kit tells them about whether there’s a landmine intered in the ground before them.

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