Fentanyl is a potent, synthetic opioid analgesic - excellent for controlling serious pain, but also with huge abuse potential. It is 80 to 500 times stronger than morphine. From 2013 to 2016, nearly 10,000 Americans died as result by using overdose fentanyl. Fentanyl is often mixed with heroin or cocaine without user knowledge. To prevent the overdose of fentanyl, there is an urgent need to detect fentanyl in a mixture of chemicals.

The purpose of the project is to design a system that can detect fentanyl in a mixture of chemicals by separating compounds. The system will use “thin layer chromatography” to separate the compounds using an optical instrument that detects the existence of fentanyl.