Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium are important pollutants of water, soil and food. They have very high stability and a refractory nature, and are widely distributed in the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere. As industry continues to expand and pollution increases, more and more heavy metals enter the hydrosphere, the soil and the air via domestic sewage and industrial wastewater. Being absorbed by plants and animals and then entering the human body, these heavy metals can cause severe consequences in humans such as bone disease, anemia, brain damage and diabetes. The goal of this project is to conceive, study and implement a novel fiber-optic-based multi-channel sensing system for sensitive and selective detection of heavy metals. A complementary and vertically integrated set of tasks will be undertaken, including (a) development and characterization of novel fluorescent molecular probes for sensing trace amounts of heavy metals such as mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium in water; and development of (b) methods for integrating these molecular probes and depositing them on optical fibers; (c) methods of modeling, fabrication, instrumentation and testing of efficient fiber-optic sensing devices based on this original combination of fluorescent sensory materials, including both polymer and liquid forms; and (d) methods of high-level system integration with fiber sensing architectures featuring high signal-to-noise ratios and multiple-channel sampling capabilities. The main focus will be to develop a hand-held system for on-site, fast, cheap and multi-target analysis of water without any pre-treatment procedures. Such a system could prove its value as a monitoring tool in Canada in remote locations or during remediation of chemical spills, as well as in underdeveloped countries where it could provide a cheap individual water monitoring tool to hundreds of millions of people.