Researchers say turmeric can replace more complex solutions to spot explosives.
India has all the reasons to smile as its patented haldi or turmeric can be also used for detecting explosives.
Also known as curcumin, turmeric is already well-known for its anti-cancer and anti-oxidant properties. Now, researchers at American Physical Society have suggested that it could replace more complex solutions to spot explosives such as TNT.
They have found that turmeric has the inherent quality of fluorescence spectroscopy used in several sensing and analysis techniques. Some chemicals when illuminated re-emit light of a different colour, sometimes for extended periods. The re-emitted light can change if different molecules bind to fluorescent ones, and that is how sensing techniques exploit the effect, their study says.
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research says India is well-equipped to protect 2.26 lakh formulations within “days and weeks” and without cost, whereas in the cases of neem and turmeric, it incurred a huge cost and took over 10 years to get patents revoked at EPO.
While India has been concentrating on using turmeric in medicines, Abhishek Kumar, who is associated with University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and colleagues have found that haldi powder has fluorescence properties which could be used for explosive detection. “If you have a gram of TNT... and you sample a billion air molecules from anywhere in the room, you’ll find four or five molecules of TNT — that’s the reason they’re so hard to detect,” a report quotes Kumar.
The US state department estimates there are about 60 to 70 million landmines in the world, he said, adding, “We need a very portable, field-deployable sensing device which is cheap, very sensitive, and easy to handle.”
A curcumin-based mine detector could outperform the animal version of tracer.
Kumar’s team was investigating the use of curcumin for biological applications, trying to make it easily dissolve in water, when it hit on the idea of making use of its optical properties. Curcumin’s optical properties worked only when it was dissolved in a liquid; when evaporated to a solid, it clumped together and the fluorescence stopped.
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