3D-Printed Dog Nose Sniffs Out Explosives

Researchers have looked to one of nature's best chemical detectors - the dog - to help make today's chemical detection devices better at sniffing out explosives and other contraband materials. Matt Staymates, a mechanical engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), uses a schlieren imaging system to visualize the flow of vapors into an explosives detection device fitted with an artificial dog nose that mimics the 'active sniffing' of a dog. The 3D-printed dog nose, which was developed by Staymates and colleagues at NIST, MIT, and the U.S. FDA, can improve trace chemical detection as much as 16-fold.

Transcript

00:00:00 So whether you're an artist or an author, or even a scientist, chances are you have been inspired by nature at some point in time. [MUSIC] So here at NIST, we turn to our K9 companions for inspiration and help with our research. We are interested in making today's chemical detector's better at detecting explosives, narcotics, other contraband material. After all, the K9 is one of nature's best chemical detectors. [MUSIC] So here's what's amazing about the dog and how they smell.

00:00:41 A lot of it has to do with the geometry of the nose and the way that they exhale. See, when they exhale, they kind of go down and backwards, and by doing that, they are literally reaching out and pulling new air towards them. It's called fluid entrainment and here, I can show you what it looks like in the lab. [MUSIC] So back here in the lab at NIST, we are using 3D printers to create anatomically correct artificial dog's noses. And in fact, we have a system that makes the dog's nose sniff like a real dog. In this case, it is a female Labrador retriever,

00:01:19 we can put this artificial dog's nose into what's called a Schlieren Optical System. This is a system that allows us to visualize how air is moving in and around an environment. So if I draw your attention to the screen, as the dog is sniffing, this sniffing acetone vapor here, there's an exhale down to the right of the screen. When the dog exhales, he's literally reaching out and entraining or pulling air towards themselves, and sometimes from very impressive distances. So, now that we know what the dog does, this is actually one piece of the puzzle for why the dog is this amazing chemical detector. What's the point of all this?

00:01:58 The point of this is, what we call, biomimicry, it's taking what we learned, what nature already does, and applying it, integrating it into technology that we're trying to improve. So what we've done, I've taken several commercially available vapor detectors. These are sniffers and we've incorporated what are essentially nostrils that make these system, this commercial systems sniff like a real dog. And the improvements that we've seen are fairly dramatic, sometimes by a factor of 18. The lessons learned from the dog here, we hope that will feed into the development of the next generation of this technology, for detecting explosives,

00:02:37 narcotics, chembio pathogens, possibly even cancer. [MUSIC]