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Voluntary Consensus Standards for Chemical Detectors
June 2012
Pamela M. Chu, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Charles E. Laljer, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
In the event of a toxic chemical release, either through an act of terrorism, industrial accident, or natural
disaster, effective incident management requires accurate real-time chemical analysis of the materials in
question. To help ensure that proper evacuation and decontamination procedures can be initiated, it is
critical for first responders and soldiers to have chemical detection equipment which enables the
identification of the chemical hazard, the threat level, and the boundaries of the contaminated area.
Furthermore, the detection equipment must operate reliably and accurately, and the users must have
confidence in the equipment. Correctly identifying and quantifying hazardous chemical vapors in the
field is challenging; there are hundreds of industrial chemicals that are toxic at low concentrations from
parts-per-million to sub parts-per-billion concentrations. Environmental conditions and commonly
occurring benign chemicals can impact the measurement of vapors of interest by either masking the
presence of a toxic material (false negative) or, conversely, by triggering an alarm when toxic materials
are not present (false positive). These false negative alarms expose people to significant health risks
while false positive alarms cause user loss of confidence in the equipment and unnecessary and costly
evacuations.
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