ARBOK-SMARTDUST: A Thermally Expanded Graphite (TEGA) Contrast Marker for Locating Hidden Voids

Hidden voids — basements, tunnels, cavities under floor slabs, caverns in soil and embankments — are located today by drilling, excavation, ground-penetrating radar, seismic methods or satellite monitoring of surface subsidence. Each of these measures a property of the structure from outside. This paper describes ARBOK-SMARTDUST, a different principle: a contrast marker is delivered into the void by the void itself. Light, free-flowing thermally expanded graphite Arbok (TEGA) dust is sprayed over a territory or an object, settles in cracks, cavities and porous fill, and is then read in two independent channels: radio-wave absorption in the range from hundreds of MHz to several GHz, and thermal contrast under and after irradiation, where a difference of a few degrees is sufficient for confident detection. Repeated measurements separate stable accumulations of dust from random background and yield a map of hidden volumes, rooms and passages. The approach rests on the economics of the marker: TEGA is produced in-house at industrial scale, up to 1,000 kg per hour at approximately 50 USD/kg, which makes mass coverage of an area economically feasible. The concept is at the research and development stage; the paper sets out the physical basis, the detection scheme, the application scenarios and the bench-test programme that precedes field scaling.