Abstract
Water quality-related incidents are attracting attention globally as they cause serious diseases and even threaten human lives. The current detection and monitoring methods are inadequate because of their long operation time, high cost, and complex process. In this context, there is an increasing demand for low-cost, multiparameter, real-time, and continuous-monitoring methods at a higher temporal and spatial resolution. Optofluidic water quality sensors have great potential to satisfy this requirement due to their distinctive features including high throughput, small footprint, and low power consumption. This paper reviews the current development of these sensors for heavy metal, organic, and microbial pollution monitoring, which will breed new research ideas and broaden their applications.
Highlights
Water pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental problems in the world today [1,2,3,4]
Optofluidic devices are good candidates for online continuous water quality monitoring because they can be integrated into different application fields, have reasonably low manufacturing cost and small chemical/energy consumption, which will minimize the hardware investment and operational costs
In an optofluidic device for Hg2+ detection [41], functionalized nanoparticles were fully mixed with the water sample in the microchannels and the absorbance of the solution was measured via a UV-Vis spectrophotometer
Summary
Water pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental problems in the world today [1,2,3,4]. Traditional methods to monitor water pollutants normally need to collect samples from a reservoir or watershed and send them to laboratories for testing and a final analysis report. Microfluidics, known as lab-on-a-chip or biochip, refers to techniques to control, operate, and detect fluids at microscopic dimensions It can realize the basic functions of chemical and biological laboratories on a chip, with the goals of miniaturizing, automating, and integrating multifunction from processing to testing samples through the intersection of chemistry, micromachining, computers, electronics, materials science, and biology [22,23]. A few attempts to commercialize the related technology for the real-world application have been reported, such as eventlab from optiqua and parasitometer from Water Optics Technology, optofluidic devices for water pollution monitoring are mostly used in laboratories. We highlight several commercial products and discuss their potential applications to water research and environment science
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