Earlier this year at UBC Okanagan’s Advanced Thermo-Fluidic Laboratory, engineering professor Mina Hoorfar and PhD student Mohammad Paknahad developed a breathalyzer for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana. While attempting to make an affordable miniature gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) device, it occurred to them that, with marijuana becoming legalized in more parts of the world every year, there was a growing market they could to tap into. When testing out their device as a THC detector was a success, they started to develop their device specifically as a marijuana breathalyzer.
Unlike traditional breathalyzers, this device utilizes GC-MS and a computer, and is therefore highly adaptable – it can easily be used to search for concentrations of a variety of chemicals. Some other uses they’ve thought of for the device include analyzing the characteristics of wine, checking your own blood alcohol content, monitoring glucose levels in diabetic people, and finding gas leaks along pipelines.
Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry schematic, courtesy of Wikimedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Gcms_schematic.gif) Gas is injected into the column, where it sorts itself into groups based on properties such as polarity and molecule size. The groups of molecules pass through the mass spectrometer, which analyzes how much of each chemical there is.
Mina Hoorfar specializes in microfluidics, the field of manipulating tiny amounts of gas and liquid using their chemical properties. In this device, the exhaled breath is channeled through a column that is only one micrometer thick, where the chemical components are separated by their properties and analyzed using the same processes as in regular GC-MS. The results are then sent via Bluetooth to a computer or smartphone, showing the user exactly what is in their breath. The device would cost about $15 to build – incredibly cheap for a GC-MS device, which often cost thousands of dollars – and Hoorfar says that she is working with a lab instrument company to bring the device to the market.
~ Nat Shipp
