Abstract
Heavy metals are very toxic and hazardous for human health. Onsite screening of heavy metal contaminated samples along with location-based automation data collection is a tedious job. Traditionally high-end equipment’s such as gas chromatography mass spectrometer (GC–MS) and atomic absorption spectrometers have been used to measure the concentration of different heavy metals in water samples but most of them are costly, bulky, and time consuming, and requires expert human intervention. This manuscript reports an ultra-portable, rapid, cost-effective, and easy-to-use solution for onsite heavy metal concentration measurement in drinking water samples. Presented solution combines off-the-shelf available chemical kits for heavy metal detection and developed spectrometer-based readout for concentration prediction, quality judgment, and automatic data collection. Two chemical kits for copper and iron detection have been imported form Merck and have been used for overall training and testing. The developed spectrometer has capability to work with smartphone-based android app and also can work in standalone mode. The developed spectrometer uses white light-emitting diode as a source and commercially imported spectral sensor (AS7262) for visible radiation reception. A low-power sub-GHZ-based wireless embedded platform has been developed and interfaced with source and detector. A power management module also has been designed to monitor the battery status and also to generate low battery indication. Overall modules has been packaged in custom designed enclosure to avoid external light interference. The developed system has been trained using standard buffer samples with known heavy metal concentrations and further tested for water samples collected from institute colony and nearby villages. The obtained results have been validated with commercially imported system from HANNA instruments, and it has been observed that developed system has shown excellent accuracy to predict heavy metal concentration (tested for Fe and Cu) in water samples.
Highlights
Due to rapid urbanization and industrial development, heavy metal pollution in groundwater has become a major issue throughout many countries all over the world, owing to their possible toxic effects in people’s life
Fabricated fluorescent carbon nanodots microarray-based sensing platform has been coupled with smartphone-based color detection application to correlate change in color with the concentration of heavy metal contamination presence in water samples
Further capability of smartphone to detect change in color has been exploited to measure mercury contamination in water by integrating smartphone-based application with fabricated paper-based colorimetric sensor (Firdaus, et al 2019). Another colorimetric sensor array for discrimination of multiple heavy metal ions presence in aqueous solution based on three different kind of thiols as a receptors
Summary
Due to rapid urbanization and industrial development, heavy metal pollution in groundwater has become a major issue throughout many countries all over the world, owing to their possible toxic effects in people’s life. Further UV–VIS spectrometer has been used to analyze the change in color and to correlate with the concentration of chromium in water sample (Ravindran, et al 2012) Another very interesting effort has been observed to detect multiple heavy metal contamination in drinking water samples using a chemically functionalized microfluidic-based platform. Further capability of smartphone to detect change in color has been exploited to measure mercury contamination in water by integrating smartphone-based application with fabricated paper-based colorimetric sensor (Firdaus, et al 2019) Another colorimetric sensor array for discrimination of multiple heavy metal ions presence in aqueous solution based on three different kind of thiols as a receptors. Two different digital image processing methods have been reported and compared to measure the change in color (Firdaus, et al 2014) In another application, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy has been reported to detect multiple heavy metal contamination presence in water samples. The presented invention integrates existing chemical kits knowledge with developed IoT-enabled handheld spectrometer to predict concentration of multiple heavy metals contamination in drinking water samples
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