Environmental Monitoring using Fibre-optics by Microextraction and Chromatography with optical detection

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Environmental monitoring for a wide range of contaminants is increasingly important as human activities causegreater stress on environmental systems. Water quality is of particular concern, as evidenced by an increasingnumber of contamination events affecting drinking water or water sources. Currently, monitoring is infrequentand expensive, and knowledge of contamination trends, even in drinking water, is seriously lacking. InCanada, drinking water is monitored daily for microbiological contaminants only at the plant, and chemicalcontaminants are checked only every three months.My research program is targeted to detection of organic molecules in a variety of sample types, where themolecules are sometimes contaminants of concern, and in other applications are secondary indicators ofcontamination. We are detecting a variety of organic analytes, with a significant emphasis on polycyclicaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), but a core set of analytical techniques and principles is used in all projects. Afundamental step in most methods for analyzing organic compounds is the transfer of the analyte from thesample matrix using a "partitioning" or "extraction" process. Sometimes partitioning is relatively non-specific,such as in solvent extraction or solid-phase micro-extraction (SPME), and also in high-performance liquidchromatography.We will use these core techniques to develop new technology for detecting E.coli and other bacteria in water.  We will develop new polymer SPME coatings for fibre-optic components to be used in ring-downspectroscopy based environmental sensors. We will developed a novel series of HPLC techniques which allow for isolating and determining the alkyl-PAH in oils. These will contribute to a completely new regime for characterizing environmental contamination in the future.