A potential $14 million contract awarded to American Science and Engineering [ASEI] last month from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to begin developing a non-intrusive inspection system that could automatically detect and identify various contraband and other threat materials will begin with concept and design studies, modeling and limited component testing, says the government’s program manager for the effort.
The first phase of the work will last for about 18 months and is funded at $2.2 million, says David Taylor, the cargo program manager within the Border and Maritime Security Division at DHS Science and Technology. Depending on how that effort goes, DHS will decide whether to proceed to the next phase in the CanScan effort, Taylor says.
Taylor says the CanScan effort will essentially run like any other S&T program, a “very traditional systems engineering and program management approach” that if successful will go from a concept study and design to a prototype that is first tested in a laboratory environment and then possibly in an operational environment.
The goal of AS&E’s award is to develop a system to meet the needs of Customs and Border Protection to screen air cargo arriving in the U.S. for contraband such as currency, drugs and other materials, including explosives, Taylor says. The project is not “explosives-centric,” he says.
While CanScan is focused on CBP, developments of interest will be shared with the Transportation Security Administration and other divisions within S&T, such as Explosives, Taylor says.
The NII system would be able to screen air cargo that is either palletized, which is typically on a metal plate called a “cookie sheet,” or contained in a container called a unit load device.
In general, Taylor says, the technology that will be developed under the contract will use multiple X-Ray energies and algorithms for materials detection. Then basically the imaging techniques and the algorithm are combined “so that we would be able to define what the material is along with the image,” he says.
AS&E will employ three imaging techniques under the effort, none of which involve the company’s well known backscatter technology, Joe Reiss, the company’s vice president of Marketing, tells TR2. One detection technique is being developed with the company’s industry partner, Bubble Technologies. AS&E isn’t disclosing any details about this portion of the program.
The other two techniques involved transmission X-Ray technology, one based on dual energy-high energy capabilities and the other on dual energy-medium energy capabilities, Reiss says. The dual energy-high energy technique will enable discrimination of materials with high atomic numbers such as lead or uranium, he says. The dual energy-medium energy technique will help classify lower atomic materials, he adds.
Reiss says that “We think that this technique that we’re using can certainly make a lot of headway in detecting that broad range of items that they’re looking for and also doing so in a way that’s practical enough in an operating environment that will have satisfactory throughput and so forth for trying to screen palletized cargo.”
If successfully developed, the system will not “take the man out of the loop and be fully automated” but it will enable an anomaly to be seen and then have another capability to look “at a section of the cargo and say, ‘that is in fact made up of a chemical compound that’s related to a certain type of drug,'” Taylor says.
Combining the multiple imaging techniques with materials discrimination will be challenging, Taylor says.
“This is a long-term, multi-year project,” Taylor says. “We’re going to go through a series of trades. We’re going to go through the requirements. If we find that a requirement is difficult we’ll make an adjustment in the requirement.”