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，为了监测它们如何变化，需要进行一系列观测。对水的物理性质（如温度和盐度）的原位测量几乎是微不足道的，但解决水的地球化学性质甚至营养水平的更高级别的传感器通常是复杂的，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学到生物学的现场真实的时间信息的仪器，以支持研究人员、工业界、决策者和公众。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”设备，它能够实时检测和分类无数复杂的化学混合物。在这个项目中，我们将首次在水生环境中使用这种新型的纳米级传感器。通过开发一种专门针对水生领域测量的便携式舌头设备，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，能够分类和识别一系列物理，生物和生态系统指标。

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.