Abstract
Determining the distributions and variations of chemical elements in oceans has significant meanings for understanding the biogeochemical cycles, evaluating seawater pollution, and forecasting the occurrence of marine disasters. The primary chemical parameters of ocean monitoring include nutrients, pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), and heavy metals. At present, ocean monitoring mainly relies on laboratory analysis, which is hindered in applications due to its large size, high power consumption, and low representative and time-sensitive detection results. By integrating photonics and microfluidics into one chip, optofluidics brings new opportunities to develop portable microsystems for ocean monitoring. Optofluidic platforms have advantages in respect of size, cost, timeliness, and parallel processing of samples compared with traditional instruments. This review describes the applications of optofluidic platforms on autonomous and in situ ocean environmental monitoring, with an emphasis on their principles, sensing properties, advantages, and disadvantages. Predictably, autonomous and in situ systems based on optofluidic platforms will have important applications in ocean environmental monitoring.
Highlights
The ocean is a vast repository of resources for human society and an essential material foundation for the sustainable development of society and environment
We forecast that an autonomous and in situ system based on optofluidic platforms will play important roles in the development of ocean environmental monitoring
For many optofluidic autonomous monitoring systems based on the colorimetric method, the limit of detections (LODs) is not comparable to the results obtained by traditional methods because of the limitations on the size of the absorption cell on microchips
Summary
The ocean is a vast repository of resources for human society and an essential material foundation for the sustainable development of society and environment. With continuous development and utilization of oceans by human beings, the ocean ecological environment has been gradually destroyed, and the marine ecological system has been severely damaged. Optofluidics has the potential to detect various optical parameters with high sensitivity and accuracy, such as refractive index, fluorescence, and absorbance. It avoids the complicated processes in traditional detection methods. The most favored materials for optofluidic chips are polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) [15] and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), both of them are cheap and replaceable These advantages of high integration, sensitivity and accuracy, and low cost make the optofluidic technology widely used in environmental monitoring [5,17] and biochemical sensing. We forecast that an autonomous and in situ system based on optofluidic platforms will play important roles in the development of ocean environmental monitoring
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