E-SMART system for in-situ detection of environmental contaminants. Quarterly technical progress report, July--September, 1995

On this Technology Reinvestment Project (TRP) for the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), General Atomics (GA) leads a team of industrial, academic, and Government organizations to develop the Environmental Systems Management, Analysis and Reporting network (E-SMART). E-SMART is a comprehensive, fully-integrated approach to in-situ, real-time detection and monitoring of environmental contaminants. GA`s team members include Isco, Inc., Photonic Sensor Systems (PSS), Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Science and Engineering Analysis Corporation (SECOR), and the US Air Force Armstrong Laboratory Environics Directorate at Tyndall AFB (AL). This ARPA TRP project will further develop and advance the E-SMART standardized network protocol to include new sensors, sampling systems, and graphical user interfaces. Specifically, the E-SMART team will develop the following three system elements: a new class of smart, highly sensitive, chemically-specific, in-situ, multichannel microsensors utilizing integrated optical interferometry technology, a large, commercially viable set of E-SMART-compatible sensors, samplers, and network management components, and a user-friendly graphical user interface for data evaluation and visualization. In addition, the E-SMART TRP team has signed Articles of Collaboration with another ARPA TRP awardee, Sawtek, to develop an E-SMART compatible Intelligent Modular Array System (IMAS) for monitoring volatile organic chemicals (VOC`s) in the environment. This collaboration will simplify the network development required to field the IMAS sensor, and will encourage the adoption of the E-SMART standard by increasing the number of commercially available E-SMART sensors