[ghostly_s]

> however the big question to answer was : is the radar sensitive enough to tell the difference consistently between a material, and it's same counterpart with asbestos shards and at what concentration ?

Unless I missed something, it seems the "POC" device still made no effort to address this, which is the core feature — it just demonstrated classifying some other common materials. If that's true then the conclusions make no sense to me - why would customers be lining up if you still haven't proven the actual concept?

[eichin]

At least in the US (and this probably is different from Europe) it matters a huge amount how the asbestos is exposed to the environment. Asbestos that's sealed up generally gets (a) labelled so noone cuts into it (b) sealed up even further - but if it's exposed, the evaluation is more about "can it get into the air" (sealing is again the preferred step, epoxy over tile, that sort of thing) - actually removing it is a last resort. So "mere detection" is a really small part of the problem.

(Of course, the place I've dealt with this the most was a former post office building from the late 1930s - we didn't really need tests, a historian would probably have just said "of course you have asbestos" :-) It does expose an interesting problem with the labeling part, though: USPS as an ancient federal agency has its own rules for things and had a distinct asbestos markers - an A in a point-down triangle - which we fortunately found documentation for, it isn't public record.)

[GL26]

The POC was made to classify materials, we couldn't get our hands on scientific grade materials that would allow to test our hypothesis, so we falled back to just identifying materials. We even went to identifying multilayer materials. You are totally right, this is not a true total POC, it's like the "level 1" of the POC needed to prove this was possible.