Spectroelectrochemical technologies and instrumentation for environmental and process monitoring

The importance of techniques to sense and monitor the environment are becoming increasingly more important with the intensifying presence of groundwater and soil contaminations. Our research and development effort is aimed at producing a commercial, low cost, field portable instrument for the field screening/in situ monitoring of contamination from organic solvents based on the principle of combining spectroscopic, electrochemical, and fiber optic techniques. Some of the advantages of this technique for monitoring a contamination site are cost, small size of sampling probe, real-time analysis, the capability of sensing in adverse environments, and the ability of using a central detection facility. The technique has an advantage over current integrating fiber optic chemical sensing methods in that the sensing only takes place when the electrochemical device is turned on. This should enable long-term monitoring of a site to be accomplished with only one probe/instrument system.