Spectral ID: Exploiting Optical Reflectance Spectrometry

The proposed project continues an investigation into the commercial possibilities of a simple analytical technique called optical reflectance spectrometry, which has emerged from PPARC- (now STFC-) funded research at Leicester. This work has already shown promise not only in the particular area of anti-counterfeiting, where preliminary testing with consumer goods and pharmaceutical packaging has demonstrated a capability to discriminate between genuine and counterfeit articles, but also in areas such as forensic science, in airport security -for the identification of liquids - even in studies related to the quantitation, in the growing plant sweet wormwood, of the natirual anti-malarial compound artemesinin. The Business Idea ifor which we seek funding s that illumination of a solid or liquid surface and the detection of the reflected spectrum provides a simple, rapid, non-destructive characteristic 'signature' of that surface, when portable hardware is used in conjunction with a reference database and relatively straightforward analysis software,