Electronic Tongue-FIA system for the Monitoring of Heavy Metal Biosorption Processes

Abstract

An automated flow injection potentiometric (FIP) system with electronic tongue detection (ET) was used for the monitoring of biosorption processes of heavy metals on waste biomaterial. Grape stalk wastes were used as biosorbent to remove Cu2+ ions in a fixed‐bed column setup. For the monitoring, the used ET employed a sensor array formed by Cu2+ and Ca2+ selective electrodes and two generic heavy‐metal electrodes. The subsequent cross‐response obtained was processed by a multilayer artificial neural network (ANN) model in order to resolve the concentrations of the monitored species. The coupling of the electronic tongue with the automation features of the flow‐injection system (ET‐FIP) allowed us to accurately characterize the biosorption process, through obtaining its breakthrough curves. In parallel, fractions of the extract solution were analyzed by atomic absorption spectroscopy in order to validate the results obtained with the reported methodology.