Method of chemical tagging
OwnerDavid K. Anderson, II, Manuel E. Gonzalez +1inventors
InventorsDavid K. Anderson, II, Manuel E. Gonzalez, Nicholas Paul Valenti
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Rare elements, which can be selected from Ni, Cu, W, Li, N, Ce, Sn, Y, Nd, Nb, Co, La, Pb, Ga, Mo, Th, Cs, Ge, Sm, Gd, Be, Pr, Se, As, Hf, Dy, U, B, Yb, Er, Ta, Br, Ho, Eu, Sb, Tb, Lu, Tl, Hg, I, Bi, Tm, Cd, Ag, In, Se, Pd, Pt Au, He, Te, Rh, Re, Ir, Os, and Ru can be used to tag commodities, including explosive materials, with a unique tagging agent.
Claims16
A method for forming a tagged chemical composition, said method comprising
- providing elemental analysis results for a chemical composition indicating concentrations of rare elements in said chemical composition;
- and
- adding a combination of at least two rare elements to said chemical composition to form a tagged chemical composition;
- wherein each of said at least two rare elements is foreign to said chemical composition and the combination of said at least two rare elements is added to said chemical composition by solution impregnation of said at least two rare elements from homogenous solution so that the combination of said at least two rare elements is added to the chemical composition as a dispersion at the atomic level:
- and the combination of said at least two rare elements is added to said chemical composition in amounts sufficient so that the combination of said at least two rare elements added to the chemical composition can be subsequently determined by an elemental analysis of the tagged chemical composition.
A method for determining the source of an explosive material used in an explosion which has formed a blast residue, said method comprising
- collecting a portion of the blast residue,
- identifying a combination of at least two rare elements present in the collected portion of the blast residue,
- correlating the combination of said at least two rare elements identified in the blast residue with a combination of at least two rare elements of a tagged explosive material, and
- determining the source of the tagged explosive material;
- wherein the combination of said at least two rare elements is uniformly dispersed at the atomic level in the blast residue, and
- the tagged explosive material with which the combination of said at least two rare elements was correlated was tagged with said combination of said at least two rare elements, each of said rare elements in said combination being foreign to the tagged explosive material.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.