High Speed Laser Diagnostics for Bioagent Defeat Applications

Recent interest in tailoring energetic materials designed to combat biological weapons agents (BWAs) has resulted in significant effort to produce and test these munitions. These energetic materials may contain agent defeat additives that enhance the capability of a munition to destroy BWAs through chemical methods in addition to heat. However, quantifying levels of agent and biocidal species and their interaction is difficult, and efforts have primarily focused on either ex-situ culturing of exposed bioagent simulants or in situ laser absorption measurements. These experiments are valuable for exploring long term agent defeat and line of sight averaged defeat. What these experiments do not provide, however, is in-situ, spatio-temporally resolved imaging in the reaction zone. To address this gap, this work develops the use of in-situ, high speed, two-dimensional optical diagnostics of fireballs and biological weapons agents simulants (BWA-S).

Planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) and laser scattering have been conducted in situ. PLIF of both iodine vapor and BWA-S has demonstrated the ability to qualitatively observe species concentration in fireballs. The application of simultaneous techniques provides imaging of multiple parameters, which is invaluable to the further study of BWA-S and agent defeat interactions. These studies also provide the framework for future work in moving towards quantitative measurements, including the development of absorption and fluorescence models.