A lab on a chip: using nano-plasmonics tongues for building miniaturized ecosystem sensors

可持续性和人类福祉取决于海洋和淡水系统的资源，为了监测它们的变化，需要进行一系列观察。在现场测量水的物理性质，如温度和盐度，几乎是微不足道的，但更高水平的传感器，以解决生物地球化学性质，甚至营养水平，往往是复杂的，昂贵的或需要专家操作。因此，迫切需要能够在水生生态系统中提供从物理到生物学的现场实时信息的仪器，以支持研究人员、行业、政策制定者和公众。我们最近的一项技术发展可以解决这个问题，那就是实现了一种被动的“人工舌头”装置，能够实时检测和分类无数复杂的化学混合物。在本项目中，我们将首次在水生环境中使用这种新型纳米级传感器。通过开发一种专门用于水生现场测量的便携式舌形装置，您将致力于展示一种多功能、低功耗、高分辨率的光学传感器阵列，能够对一系列物理、生物和生态系统指标进行分类和识别。

Sustainability and human wellbeing depend on resources from marine and freshwater systems, and to monitor how they are changing, a range of observations are needed. In situ measurements of physical water properties like temperature and salinity are almost trivial, but higher-level sensors that address biogeochemical properties, or even trophic levels, are often complicated, expensive or need expert operation. Therefore, there is a desperate need for instrumentation that can deliver in-situ, real time information from physics to biology in aquatic ecosystems supporting researchers, industry, policy makers and the public. A recent technological development of ours that could address this problem is the realisation of a passive "artificial tongue" device capable of detecting and classifying a myriad of complex chemical mixtures in real-time.In this project, we will use this new class of nano-scale sensor in an aquatic environment for the first time. Through the development of a portable tongue device specifically tuned for aquatic field measurements you will aim to demonstrate a versatile, low- power, high-resolution optical sensor array capable of classifying and identifying a range of physical, biological and ecosystem indicators.