SECReT 2010 PhD projects
- Metal oxide semiconductor gas sensors as an electronic nose for the detection of microbial agents
- What are the factors that make communities vulnerable to, or resistant against, the emergence of radicalising settings?
- Covert taggant nanoparticle inks - discovery, process and product development, and analysis for sustainability and efficiency
- Diffusion processes of political violence: The role of information
- Engineering IT risk awareness, education and training
- Three-dimentional imaging of baggage for security applications.
- Understanding the traffic-driven epidemic spreading in scale-free networks
- Optimal search and detection of targets in an uncertain environment using unmanned aerial vehicle
- Explosive residue: Evaluation and optimisation of detection and sampling procedures
- Forecasting adversary’s scenarios: Systemic competitive red teaming
- Secure digital archive and web search using a Probably Approximately Correct architecture
- Mobilising community resilience through techno-social innovation
- Numerical modelling/empirical analysis of civil conflict
- Landmine, IED, UXO Detection using Ground Penetrating Radar from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
- Towards a usable and less disruptive security in the workplace
- Securing from exploits using information theoretical techniques
- Crime drop in Chile: Searching for causes and mechanisms
- Inferring user behaviour despite wireless network encryption
- The Chain of Evidence - a critical appraisal of the applicability and validity of forensic research and the usability of forensic evidence
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Covert taggant nanoparticle inks - discovery, process and product development, and analysis for sustainability and efficiency
7 March 2012
A current limitation in the global taggant industries is the inadequate number of inorganic phosphors that can be uniquely identified for authentication purposes. Thus, there is scope to enlarge the pool of available taggants by offering new and unique signature phosphors for brand protection and improving safety by avoiding the use of sub-standard counterfeit products. This project is primarily based in the Department of Chemistry, where inorganic phosphor nanoparticles will be synthesised using continuous hydrothermal flow synthesis (CHFS) then optically screened to select lead taggants for optimisation. Rare-earth-doped nanoparticles are of interest, in particular those which absorb and emit near infra-red light.
The next stage will be to scale up production using an existing facility, and to then develop printable inks in collaboration with SunChemical, one of the world's largest producers of printing inks, during a possible internship. In conjunction to this, models of the laboratory-scale and scaled up processes will be developed in the Department of Chemical Engineering. This will allow a quantitative evaluation of the impact of the choice of taggant to be carried out by assessing not only the economic costs of the process, but also the environmental impacts. These factors can be contrasted with the level of security offered by each taggant composition, and allow the identification of where trade-offs can be made.
