Publication details
Development of highly porous metasilicate pellets for unique use in chemical warfare agent detection systems
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Extrusion/spheronization is one of the many methods of pharmaceutical technology. This method produces highly spherical particles called pellets with a uniform shape and particle size distribution. Such particles can also be used in other scientific fields, for example, in analytical chemistry, where detection reagents can be adsorbed on the surface of the pellets and subsequently used for detection purposes. In practice, they are used as carriers in detection tubes (DTs), which are part of the equipment of some armies and rescue services and are mainly used to detect chemical warfare agents (CWAs). This study aimed to prepare innovative carriers in the form of highly porous composite pellets that would have the above-mentioned properties and also high specific surface area (SSA) and thus be suitable for interdisciplinary applications, especially for second-generation DTs. To achieve that, a mesoporous, amorphous magnesium aluminometasilicate – Neusilin® US2 with high SSA (300 m2/g) was utilized. To form pores and thus further increase the SSA of the prepared pellets, volatile substances (VSs) such as menthol (M) and camphor (C) were added to the powder mixture in various concentrations. Subsequent drying of the samples at 60 °C removed these volatiles, creating pores and increasing the SSA of the carriers. In cooperation with Oritest (Prague, Czech Republic), the most promising samples were subsequently impregnated with o-phenylenediamine-pyronine (PY-OPD) as a second-generation detection reagent and tested for the presence of diphosgene/phosgene. |
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