Evaluation of non-detonable canine training aids for explosives by headspace analysis and canine testing

There is a need for non-detonable training aids to enable training of canines when access to true material is limited. A disadvantage of non-detonable training aids is the lack of third-party independent verification and validation to certify the efficacy of the aid to yield a detection capability to true material. The goal of this research is to guide the development of a pipeline for the evaluation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or novel training aids by using both analytical analysis as well as canine olfactory testing. Headspace analysis was carried out for nitrated explosive training aids, RDX and PETN, as well as peroxide explosives, HMTD and TATP. Batch-to-batch reproducibility and usage lifetime mimicking operational usage, were also assessed for peroxide explosive aids. As a result of the analytical analysis, various issues were identified such as limitations of explosive component detection, presence of extraneous odors, dynamic headspaces, and both inter- and intra- batch variability. A single TATP training aid was selected to be tested in a proof-of-concept canine assessment which compared canines trained using true material in their ability to detect the training aid in question and a set of canines trained solely with a COTS training aid in their ability to detect true material. It took the canines collectively nearly 21 trials of exposures to true TATP before all canines trained with the non-detonable training aid were able to detect the true TATP with a 100% detection rate, highlighting the importance of analytical characterization of non-detonable training aids paired with canine validation studies.