Miniaturization and Optimization of the Standard Spectrophotometric Analysis for Autonomous, Continuous and On-site Heavy Metal Detection in Water

Water environmental monitoring is an important key to control both human life and environment health. When water quality is poor, it affects not only aquatic life but the surrounding ecosystem as well. The greatest limitation of detection devices, today on the market, is that they are limited to the measurement phase, burdening the operator of the previous sample treatment. The development of a threshold monitoring device, designed for real time water environmental monitoring, was the aim of this study. The focus was on the design of an autonomous system for detection of dissolved heavy metals in water by spectrophotometric analysis. The ground-breaking idea is the implementation of a system inspired to the latest innovative techniques in the field of the microfluidic analysis, based on Lab-on-Chip concept. Such a choice is due to the unique advantages in terms of reduction of sample and reagents volumes, energy budget and analysis times, besides the possible multi-element analysis on the same sample.