A device that uses a form of magnetic levitation to separate components of illegal drugs could prove useful in the fight against crime.
Street drugs are often a mixture of substances, and the police need to be able to identify exactly what they are in order to enforce the law.
The new approach, created by Christoffer Abrahamsson at Harvard University and his colleagues along with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, involves mixing a drug sample in a magnetic liquid and placing this mixture in a container with magnets on its top and bottom.
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The thermos flask-sized device, which only costs around $200 to build, separates components of the sample by their respective densities. The magnetic liquid attempts to push particles of drugs away from the magnets in order to minimise the energy of the system, while gravity and buoyancy also act on them.
The overall effect is that drugs with the same density as the liquid will stay in the middle of the container, while those of higher density will sink and those of lower density will float up. These readings can then be matched to a reference density value for pure substances like heroin or MDMA.
Read more: Does the drop in US drug deaths mean the opioid crisis is ending?
New synthetic drugs can also be spotted more quickly because they will have densities that can鈥檛 be matched to reference values. Further chemical analysis could be used to figure out what they are.
Ruth Morgan at University College London says the device could prove useful to law enforcement. 鈥淏eing able to achieve a separation of distinct substances sounds very promising and certainly applicable to the challenge of detecting specific substances that may be present within a mixed source sample that occurs in investigations.鈥�
Angewandte Chemie
